Softly Say Goodnight
by Chevira Lowe
Summary: (PG-15) Jiraiya, Orochimaru and Tsunade as a team. How they began, and why they fell apart.
1. Live

Softly Say Goodnight

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Summary: Jiraiya, Orochimaru and Tsunade as a team. How they began, and how they fell apart.

AN: Because I refuse to believe that Orochimaru is nothing more than a two-dimensional villain, even if I have to write his back story myself, damnit. This story will have more than one chapter, just so you know.

EDIT: …Because this site is eeting some of my quotation marks and I don't know why. o.O

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Somewhere, Jiraiya is gasping out his last few breaths. Tsunade's smacking his face with a bloodied glove, and it connects with a wet little _thwack _each time she does it. It leaves a dusting of blood across his cheeks, making them seem roseate and ebullient instead of lifeless and pale.

"Stay awake, damnit!" she shrills, summoning an orb of chakra as she does so. The orb she pumps into his system as if it's the only tether in the world keeping him alive. Maybe it is. Jiraiya, under her ministrations, coughs and splutters, coughs up blood. Tsunade flinches away from him momentarily, like she doesn't know what to expect of someone so near death, although she's been a medic almost as long as they've been a team.

"Orochimaru!" she yells, and he casts an expectant look over one shoulder, pushing his hair out of his way as he does so.

"Yes?"

"Cover me!" she says, but without actual cause to do so. She can be forgiven for failing to notice, as he's being covertly subtle. She's merely talking for the sake of doing it to someone who can hear her, instead of the hunk of raw meat under her hands. One of his snakes, a tiny viper no bigger around than his thumb, is currently coiled about his ankle, gleaning what warmth it can from his body. At his gentle urgings, it slithers away to scout the area. He knows it will return shortly.

Their safe hold was once a house, though it's been damaged beyond repair since its glory days. The central support beam has fallen down, charred and blackened and monochromatic against the falling snow, and Tsunade and Jiraiya are huddled under it. Jiraiya's blood stained jacket is tented over them to keep in whatever warmth their body heat can possibly offer. It's not much.

The house had been burned, razed to the ground. There's a charred, haphazard pattern across the floor and along the few walls that haven't collapsed, and the smell of burnt flesh lingers over the place like a wailing ghost, omnipresent and poignant. Orochimaru wonders if he'll ever forget it, and he doubts it.

Tsunade, busy jerking hunks of shrapnel out of Jiraiya's stomach, is fighting back tears. Orochimaru is as well, although he'd never admit it. Secretly, he's glad of the subzero temperatures, and the vicious wind that could explain away his emotions.

Jiraiya is going to die.

They both know it, but one of them has yet to accept it. Tsunade stifles her pained whimpers and looks up. Their eyes meet, over the steam rising from Jiraiya's body into the frigid air. "Orochimaru," Tsunade murmurs, as she pushes her short hair away from her face and behind one ear. The blood coating her fingers is sticky, and the hair doesn't slide forwards again. It looks as if she's pinned it with a crimson barrette. "C-come here for a sec. I can't see what I'm doing and this _stupid idiot _keeps bleeding and…"

Obligingly, with a final predatory glance out into the swirling snow, he stands and comes to kneel beside Tsunade. She points at Jiraiya's bloody, gaping maw of a stomach. Orochimaru fights down the urge to gag. "Hold back the skin…all right? I need to fix the nerves and the intestines and…I can't…do two things at once." Her forehead is furrowed like a freshly tilled field, and her desperation, frustration, _hope _is painted across her face unmistakably. She still believes she can save him. But then, she's young, and when you're young, not only are you immortal, but you can conquer anything with enough time and the right disposition.

Orochimaru doesn't like blood. He can barely tolerate the smell of putrescence, of rot, of death. He can't stand the sight of brilliant crimson splashed against his hands and across his clothes. He can't stand it because it's liquid life, and it's being wasted on him.

Tsunade seems not to notice. She works feverishly, without reprieve, her nimble fingers nowhere near frozen, considering the length of time they're spending immersed in blood. She eventually wipes her mouth with one hand, unaware of what's staining it, and then she realizes. Realizes and stumbles backwards and throws up violently onto the snow. Washes her hands off this time, and then returns, trembling. Only her eyes are cold.

Orochimaru looks at her, and takes stock of her aura, and her chakra patterns. They're feeble, flaring intermittently, and if something isn't done, she'll work herself to exhaustion, and then she and Jiraiya both will die. It would almost be fitting for them to perish together, but Orochimaru isn't ready to see that happen. He doesn't like death, doesn't particularly like _them, _but they're all he has.

"Here," he says quietly as he holds Jiraiya together with one hand and offers the other to Tsunade. "Use my chakra."

She stares at him a moment, her hazel eyes widening in shock or surprise or disbelief, because Orochimaru doesn't offer such things lightly and she knows it. And then she nods once, bites her lip and takes his hand, gripping it fiercely. There's enough excess blood coating their palms to make them stick together.

It's almost reassuring when he feels Tsunade tap into his reserves, because at least _something _is being done. Even if it's pointless, even if it won't work, it's _something. _And he'll give and give and give until Jiraiya lives or until they all die together, as a team, the way things should be.

He studies Jiraiya's ashen face, the blood smeared across his cheeks and lips, at his shock of white hair and how it's been dulled to a silver-gray. Jiraiya already looks dead. Orochimaru has seen corpses before, corpses of his making or the making of his enemies. They all look the same, to the point where it's easy to objectify the dead because they have no unique characteristics. The same gray pallor, the same lifeless expressions. But Jiraiya's eyes are closed, not open and glassy and staring at a boundless sky.

And then he stops breathing. Tsunade, noticing, shrieks like a banshee and renews her efforts with all the strength she has. She tells Orochimaru to give him mouth-to-mouth, to make things right, to make _this _right, but Orochimaru thinks it's difficult to breathe life into a corpse.

But he tries, because it's all he can do. Gingerly, as if he were kissing the forehead of his baby sister, he presses his mouth to Jiraiya's and breathes because Jiraiya can't. Because he's human and he's broken and he's dying, and because no amount of love or fierce devotion or camaraderie is going to keep him in the world.

Tsunade _snarls, _low and fierce like the leader of a wolf-pack issuing a challenge, and she alternately pounds on his chest and sends chakra into his body, little electric jolts that are sure to do _some _good, somewhere, to someone. It's said that the fluttering of a butterfly's wings can cause a whirlwind half a world away, so what ramifications would this usage of chakra have?

Their hands are still tightly laced together, bound by blood and bone, and Tsunade's grip is painfully tight. Orochimaru doesn't complain.

Orochimaru has seen death before. He's seen his mother, face-down on the ground, her long hair spread out around her like an obsidian shawl. He's seen his father pinned to a wall by various armaments to various parts of his anatomy. He's seen his baby sister with her skull caved in because the men who killed his family couldn't be bothered to do the job properly, cleanly, and because a three year old had no hope of fighting back.

Orochimaru closes his eyes and tries not to think of that.

And then Jiraiya's eyes flicker open and he sucks air into his lungs of his own volition and Orochimaru rocks back on his heels, watching expectantly. Watching for his companion who has never accepted defeat to fight off death's trumpeted challenge. Orochimaru observes him like a snake, trying to decide if the loss of the strike is worth the gain of the prize.

"Yuck," Jiraiya mumbles, licking his lips. He must not like the taste, because he wrinkles up his nose and squeezes his eyes shut. "S'my first kiss, bastard," he slurs drunkenly. Orochimaru only knows what Jiraiya sounds like drunk because all three of them had gotten inebriated as possible before they accepted the mission everyone expected to be their last. He knows Jiraiya's telling the truth, because the few times he's gotten close enough to anyone to kiss them, they usually end up punching him.

Tsunade is still crying, silently, tears rolling down her cheeks to plip into the cavernous wound upon which she's working. She won't let up, won't _give _up until she's stitched him closed and fixed him up right and seen him into a hospital bed for weeks, months, however long it takes until Jiraiya is Jiraiya again, and not some shattered marionette with the features of a friend.

Jiraiya raises a hand, tenderly, and Orochimaru can see the effort it costs him. It's of little wonder; most of his abdominal muscles are useless. He brushes his broad knuckles past Tsunade's tear-stained cheek, she catches it and holds it there, unwilling to let go, to let _him _go, because he might fall further than she could follow if she did.

"So," Jiraiya murmurs softly, hiding behind his pain with a half-grin, the sort of which he's so fond. His voice is husky and aged, hardly recognizable. "A…about…that date…"

Tsunade's sudden bark of laughter masks a sob. "In your dreams, you idiot."

Orochimaru is satisfied, for the time being. Things are as they should be. All is not well, but neither is it lost. He stands, turns his back to them and reclaims his post by the front door of the decimated house. His little viper returns and slithers up his ankle, eventually making its home around his neck. It whispers in his ear that there are presently no enemies in the area, but that he and his friends should keep moving if they want to stay alive.

Orochimaru has never told Tsunade or Jiraiya about the snakes. Tsunade hates them, he knows from experience. Once, she tried to kill a grass snake just for slithering across the road in front of them. Orochimaru had rescued it and sent it safely into the ditch, but she'd glared after it, and later at him. But Tsunade is barely fourteen, and she's squeamish around everything except blood, and so he supposes it's not entirely her fault.

Orochimaru remembers his first snake.

_His team had earned a week off, to themselves. It was a precious gift in a time of war, and he'd seized it with both hands and hurried home, hoping to measure off his sister's growth against the wall marked with colorful chalks indicative of the passage of time. Thinking it could double as training, he'd raced his shadow home, to darkness. _

_He'd stumbled into his house, screaming names no one would hear, and that no one would answer to ever again, and he'd found them in various states of decomposition. The house had buzzed with flies, and wild animals had engorged themselves on the soft tissue of his mother's stomach, and of her face. _

_He stood there a while, looking without seeing, knowing without accepting, and then he'd ran. Out the back door and past the little water shed and his mother's vegetable patch, he'd ran until his legs gave out beneath him and his sobs caught up with him, and then he'd vomited, like there was something evil inside him that he could only get out by purging everything in his body, up to and including his soul. _

_The snake had found him high in the branches of a tree, hours later. It did not have to stretch to see him there, did not have to see him to know. It merely flicked its forked tongue out and caught his scent on the wind and decided to speak to him. _

_"You are a long ways from your nest, child," it had purred, and with its snout it forced branches aside until it could see him directly. The lidless eyes had seemed to mock him. _

_He liked to say that he hadn't been afraid, although he was. The gaze of the snake had made him freeze inside, had made him feel as if he would never be warm again._

_"Was that your family, left to rot?" _

_His eyes flashed with the same serpentine irises of the snake herself, and he stood up. His chakra was roiling within him like a nest of battling serpents and he followed a branch directly to her head. "Who…" he croaked out, but his voice was rusty from crying. The snake merely tilted her head as he continued. "Who did this!" _

_"I have no business telling you that," she said disdainfully. There was a distinctly feminine lilt to its voice, and sounded like the rustle of leaves in the fall. "You're being very rude," she continued in amusement. "You have yet to introduce yourself. Do you not think that I would be more forthcoming to someone whose name I have been granted?"_

_The boy's eyes had narrowed. "…Orochimaru." _

_The laughter had come, then, like the burbling of water over rocks in a creek. "_Orochi_maru, hmm…?" the snake tilted her head until she could look at him directly. "You have nice eyes…" she whispered, with just the slightest flick of her tongue._

Orochimaru frees himself from the memories at the light love-bite of the viper. The observant little creature had noticed the state he was in, and had acted accordingly.

"Ssssstay…alert…" it whispers before re-tucking itself about his neck, trying to stay warm in the frigid atmosphere of the place they had been sent to die. It would not abandon him without reason, and he feels a sympathetic twinge. Such a place is not kind to serpents, and he would have liked to send it away, but he needs it.

Orochimaru coughs to clear his throat, and looks back at his comrades, friends, whatever they are to him. Whatever they should never have become. "We have to move," he says matter-of-factly. He doesn't ask if Jiraiya will survive such a thing, because he's already written the other boy off once today, and if he dies again, Orochimaru will have been prepared for its coming. Orochimaru does not appreciate surprises.

Predictably, Tsunade's head snaps up and she hisses at him, "Orochimaru, are you a moron! We can't move him now! He'll die for sure, and after all the work I just put into _saving _his sorry ass, I'm not going to let that happen!"

Orochimaru looks at Tsunade. Looks at Jiraiya, who in turn looks at him. A silent concession darkens the white-haired boy's eyes, and he pulls his lips into a flat frown. He seems serious, for what's probably the first time in his life. So he presses one hand to his stomach and with the other, he levers himself into a sitting position. He exhales, as if the effort had cost him more than he would ever let on.

"Get me up, jackass," he growls, and Orochimaru knows the words are directed at him. So he steps nearer, offers his hand but not his help. Jiraiya grabs him firmly and Orochimaru leans back to support his weight as Jiraiya hauls himself to his feet and stands swaying. He takes one step, and stumbles, and Orochimaru catches him because he can't let his comrades fall. Tsunade makes a sound like a wounded animal, and then she smoothes out her shirt and tries to look indifferent. She fails.

Jiraiya takes a breath and stands finally under his own steam. "I'm not gonna be a fuckin' burden on this mission," Jiraiya tells her, tells them both. "If worse comes to worse, well…" he shrugs, stupidly, because in the next heartbeat he's coughing up blood. Orochimaru slips under his arm and holds him up, and Jiraiya's fingers dig into his shoulder like iron. Jiraiya regains his breath and continues, stronger than before. "Then leave me behind, all right? I'll make sure I take a bunch of those fuckers out with me. At least you two would get out." He grins a little, as if he's trying to soften the impact of his words.

Tsunade purses her lips, gets to her feet and looks as if she wants to speak, but Orochimaru merely nods. "Very well. But we have to hurry." The little snake shifts about restlessly, its tongue flicking out every so often to taste the air. Orochimaru can't quite hear its murmur of, '_They're coming', _but then, he doesn't need to. He can sense disaster on the horizon as well as any soothsayer. "We're about to be trapped. Tsunade, you take point and bring Jiraiya with you. I'll guard behind." It was a sound strategy. Tsunade, with her medic's training, could pack more of a punch than Jiraiya or Orochimaru at the top of their form. But Orochimaru is the best on the team at tactical hit-and-run, and at dealing damage to the enemy without giving them time to counteract.

He supposes it's the snake in him.

Tsunade breathes again, and nods. She takes Jiraiya from him and he 'accidentally' gropes her chest. Orochimaru almost smiles at his proclamation of 'still flat-chested as hell,' and even Tsunade doesn't look homicidal at the quip. She doesn't even try to beat him into the ground, which is her usual reaction to that jab.

And then they eek out into the night, and the cold arms of a bludgeoning snowstorm, and to whatever death may deign to take them.

Tsunade moves as soundlessly as she can over the dusting of fresh snow, lugging Jiraiya behind her. He's only a little taller, but it's difficult at the best of times to carry dead weight. He stumbles along, one arm tightly slung across his abdomen, and he's taken his lower lip into his mouth, biting on it hard enough to stop himself from yelling with pain.

Orochimaru watches them go, swallowed by the swirling snow. Minutes later, he follows. He lopes along, utilizing the snow and the mist like a barrier between he and the rest of the world, disappearing like a wraith at some point to pop up unseen in another. He stalks his teammates quietly, quickly, with a predator's fierce efficiency, and like any predator, he's listening for outside interference. The little viper he sends off on its own to be his sentinel, and Orochimaru knows from experience that it will alert him immediately if it senses trouble.

As he moves, he readies the last few kunai and shuriken that survived the initial scuffle they'd suffered, including one that he'd pulled out of his own arm. After ensuring that they're close at hand and easy to grab, he preemptively forms the hand seals for his latest, but not his last, technique. Kuchiyose no Jutsu. It requires a phenomenal amount of chakra and of control, but Orochimaru knows he has both. He's been practicing with his snakes under the terse, watchful eye of Sarutobi sensei since the first day he'd signed the contract in blood. He's gotten proficient at summoning whichever serpent suits his needs. The little viper is his almost constant companion, and it's the only snake he really likes, or trusts.

He leaves off on forming the last hand seal until it becomes necessary to do so, and he continues chasing his team until he gets caught in a chakra-snare. It bites viciously into his ankle and he hits the ground with a grunt, fingers flying in the final symbol as he does so. Whoever had set the trap pounces on him, a hawk upon a snake, and Orochimaru feels the prick of a kunai against his throat. He goes very still for a moment, and then he reaches up, wraps his hand around the blade before the man can use it. An injured palm is a far easier injury to treat than a slit throat.

The man curses in some other guttural language and wraps his other arm around Orochimaru's neck, putting him in an effective choke-hold. The boy knocks the kunai away with a burst of chakra-enforced strength, and he slams his bloody hand down on the ground in front of him, screams 'Kuchiyose no Jutsu!' in a hoarse, strangled breath.

Whoever the hawk is, it's forgotten that snakes have fangs.

The ground beneath them erupts in a flash of dark brown, angled in a pattern of diamonds and diamond-hard scales. His captor's grip is released abruptly as the man loses his footing, and he doesn't have the chakra control necessary to find purchase on the snake's hide. He screams as he falls, however far it is to earth, and Orochimaru wonders why the hawk has forgotten how to fly.

The snake, the queen, the first one he had ever seen, is angry with him. "Orochimaru, I have told you not to summon me for any reason," she hisses softly. He refrains from telling her that she reminds him of his mother.

"I apologize," he says brusquely. "But my friends are in danger and I need your help."

She laughs at him like she had all those years before, and this time he imagines it's not quite as cold. "Well, at least you summoned me to a place with lots of prey, child. I will do as you ask this time. Do not expect me to do it ever again."

He nods wordlessly, even though she can't see it, and he collapses against the crest over her right eye, clinging to it with whatever remaining chakra he can muster. All he can hear from his perch is the crunch of bones, and all he can see is the flash of scarlet blood from any number of corpses as the queen worries his enemies like rag dolls before discarding them. He hadn't been aware there were so _many _of them. They scream, and try to run. Some fight, and about the time the queen takes a spear to the side of her neck, she's truly enraged.

She uses a technique of her own, acidic snake venom, and he hears the scorching sizzle as it meets the flesh of the few she hasn't captured and killed. They scream louder, now, more with pain than fear, and eventually the screams bubble off into nothingness as the acid dissolves their skin, their organs, their bones.

She presides over the ruin a moment longer, as if assessing her work, and then she disappears in a haughty, hazy cloud. Orochimaru, bereft of her support, hits the ground, too tired even to protect himself from the fall. He's landed in a puddle of half-dissolved human, and once the realization dawns, it's motivation enough for him to move.

The slime, as he can hardly label it anything else, clings to him, everywhere, sticky and grotesque, and he can't wipe it off, _can'tgetitoff! _until his little viper companion finds him amidst the chaos and dispels its queen's dirty work. It slithers inside his grimy shirt and rests its little wedge-shaped head in the dip of his collarbone and he lays there on the ground and shivers. He doesn't even realize he's crying until Tsunade points it out to him.

When he doesn't respond, she tries again. "Orochimaru?" Her voice is hushed and careful, like she's speaking in a graveyard. In a sense, she is. Jiraiya is nowhere to be seen, although his blood is still clinging to her shirt. Orochimaru decides that's good enough. Blood is likely less annoying than Jiraiya, anyways.

"Orochimaru?" Tsunade asks, louder this time. She crouches beside him and frets a moment, like she's not sure what to do. And then she falls back on her medic's training, touches his forehead, his chest, searching for damage. Her hands flutter like uncertain birds, as if they've been separated from their flock mid-migration and aren't sure which way to dart.

"Are you all right?" she murmurs, upon finding nothing physically wrong with him.

Out of what seems like nowhere to her, he starts to laugh. He laughs and then he cries harder because he knows exactly _why _he's laughing. Tsunade makes a startled noise and then pulls him into her lap and pillows his head against her chest, and he just keeps laughing and crying and hiccoughing and trying not to breathe because breath equates life, and he doesn't like life much right now.

Unsure of herself, she strokes his hair and whispers sweet little nothings to him. He's never felt more like _gutting _her than he does right now. Instead, he hates himself and wraps his arms around her waist and lets her hold him. Around them, the detritus of the battlefield beckons to him. Scattered everywhere are dismembered limbs and broken dreams, a veritable cacophony of despair dredged up from the depths of war. He can't escape it.

Taking life is easier than giving it. Orochimaru remembers his mother during her pregnancy. Remembers how he couldn't even notice at first, and how the only hint of it had been his mother's knowing smile. How a few months later, he could barely put his arms around her any longer. He remembers how she collapsed one day while washing clothes, and how in a few short hours, she'd been in labor.

It takes pain and love and time and devotion to create a life. It takes nothing to crush it.

Eventually, Tsunade urges him to his feet and he lets her. He also lets her wrap her arms around him, lets her hold him close like he needs to be protected from the world. He lets her and he doesn't know why, because what he _does _know is that he doesn't need her.

Orochimaru hates that he wants to be protected. That he wants to be someone's precious person. That he doesn't want to have to watch a comrade battling death in front of him ever again. Hates it even as he knows it's inevitable, because they're in the middle of a _war _and no matter what he _wants, _he is a shinobi, and because he is a shinobi, he will be used in whatever matter the people who pull strings see fit.

Orochimaru knows that he will pay them back for that if it takes him the rest of his life. One day, _he _will be Hokage, and _he _will ensure that this never happens to anyone else, ever again.


	2. Fly

Softly Say Goodnight

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AN: Chapter Two, in which Chevira has fun with parallels.

Ahem. Ergo! Thanks for reading, everyone, I hope you enjoy

(Note to Kilerkki, you were right, it wasn't supposed to be Manda. It's another summons entirely, and is supposed to be Manda's, er 'mate'. Bwahah?)

-

Jiraiya spends two weeks in the hospital, and short of getting an order from the Hokage, nothing could have held him there any longer than that. Towards the end, several burly nurses had had to forcibly keep him in his room, though he was seldom in bed. He spent most of his time doing pushups or crunches or turning room four-o-eight into a miniature gymnasium. About the same time he developed a technique that managed to turn the walls and sheets pink, everyone on the general staff was glad to see him go, nurses and launderers alike. And it was good riddance to bad, ill-mannered rubbish.

Orochimaru stays a month, and never once tries to leave. They hadn't admitted him because he had suffered any injuries -the few that he had sustained were well-treated by Tsunade and healing fast. Instead, although no one said it allowed, they were worried about his mental state. Around the time he punched Tsunade for suggesting to him that he should get some rest, they'd decided that he was suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome.

_It's not surprising, _one of the nurses had whispered nearby when they'd thought he was asleep. _He's from _that _family, after all. _

Orochimaru had kept his eyes closed and pretended he hadn't heard them, but his hands fisted in his sheets under his blanket and he bit his cheek hard enough to taste the coppery tang of blood.

So now he's lying on his bed, and he's looking out the window or at the lone daffodil in a vase beside his bedside. Tsunade's peace-offering. Mostly because after he'd hit her, she beat him into the ground. She didn't say she was sorry, because she didn't like the taste of apologies on her tongue, but she'd snuck a box of his favorite sweets past the reception desk, and brought the flower. She'd made sure she'd done it while he was asleep, but it couldn't have been anyone else.

He doesn't know if he's forgiven her for it or not. He probably won't know for a while, because Orochimaru likes taking time to think things over, dissecting them from every little angle. When he was younger, he assumed he had all the time in the world.

Now…now he knows better.

"Hey, hey, hey, I don't care if you want to let me in or not. Either get out of my way or let me see down your blou - OW, HEY!" the voice drifts in from down the hall, and elicits something an almost-smile from Orochimaru. One would think that Jiraiya had suffered enough for his illicit ways that he would have learned better by now. The wise man knows nothing, or so says the old proverbs. Orochimaru doubts Jiraiya is or will ever be wise.

"Orochimaru-sama is resting, and visiting hours are over, please, return to the reception room!" that comes from right outside his door.

Orochimaru pushes himself up into a sitting position, because it wouldn't do for Jiraiya to catch him vulnerable, and he pushes his hair behind one ear as the other boy shoves the door open, and a harried nurse aside. She's trying to drag him back into the hall, but Orochimaru can tell by Jiraiya's aura that he's got enough chakra molded in his legs to withstand whatever strength she alone can muster. Jiraiya has been afflicted with a mysterious handprint on his left cheek, but that aside, he looks none the worse for wear.

"Heya, buddy!" he calls cheerfully, and he dumps a pile of mismatched flowers in Orochimaru's lap. "Miss me?" Orochimaru notes with amusement that half of them are ones to which he is allergic, and he knows that Jiraiya is well aware of that. Gingerly, he sets the bouquet aside after selecting a single white flower with some silly flowery name. In his mind, he recalls that the sap of the stem can treat poison.

"Not really." He plucks at it and shreds it methodically until the little white petals spiral down into his lap. The nurse makes an aborted effort to sweep them off and into the trash, but she changes her mind at Orochimaru's half-glare in her direction, and returns to stand by the door.

Jiraiya mock-frowns at him, and then ruffles his hair, messing it irreparably. "Ah, well. Can't have the world, I guess." He pulls up a chair, spins it around and sits down, arms draped over the rigid back. The nurse wrings her hands and Orochimaru merely shrugs at her and waves her away. Relieved of her duties, she scampers off, possibly for backup.

Jiraiya, now that the nurse is gone, leans closer and gets serious for the first time since that night on the battlefield. "Orochimaru, these quacks are telling me you're crazy." Ah, yes, and isn't he one for pleasantries?

Orochimaru raises an eyebrow. "And what do you believe?"

"I think they're full of shit, myself," he stretches out his long legs and arms like a particularly laconic dog on a lazy day, and he yawns. "You've always been a little weird, though, no denying that."

"Hm."

"But, eh, seriously. I think it's about time we got you out of here, Tsunade and I. Hospitals could drive anyone crazy, man. I almost went nuts, and I was in here for half the time you've been."

"Sarutobi-sensei came to see me," Orochimaru interrupts, putting a hand up to stop Jiraiya's random psychobabble.

"Eh?"

Orochimaru licks his lips. "My snakes…" he murmurs. "He told me not to summon them any more."

Always slow on the uptake, Jiraiya merely blinks. "What snakes?"

With a sigh, Orochimaru forms the hand seals, bites his thumb and sets his hand atop his raised knee. "Kuchiyose no Jutsu," he murmurs softly. The snake, his little viper, appears in a puff of sulfuric smoke, and Orochimaru gestures at it vaguely. It takes the opportunity to slither up his finger and wrap around his wrist.

Jiraiya stares. "Man. That _is_ awesome. Hey, teach me how to do that, will you? C'mon, Orochimaru!"

"You can't," the other boy returns primly. "You have to be granted a contract first. They wouldn't accept you."

Jiraiya pouts, and then seemingly shrugs it off. Orochimaru knows he'll ask Sarutobi-sensei later, and that was why he'd done it in the first place. There's no fun playing the game when the numbers are uneven.

"Anyways," Jiraiya continues as if the summoning had never happened. The snake still visible at Orochimaru's wrist is a reminder to the contrary. "Tsunade says you're welcome at her place, but I think you'd be better off at mine. Her mom's even more of a bitch than she is, I swear."

Orochimaru smiles, just a little, and just for Jiraiya. "Very well."

"But…you're okay, right?"

Orochimaru's eyes, the color of amber and serpentine unto themselves, drift absently to the other side of the room. He knows what Jiraiya's asking about. The white-haired boy isn't afraid of him and never will be, but he is perhaps…_worried. _Yes, an apt term. Concerned, although Orochimaru isn't sure why. They've never gotten along particularly well, they've never been close. They've never shared secrets under a canopy of stars, and isn't that what builds a friendship?

Orochimaru's looking out the window when he grabs Jiraiya by the throat. The boy makes a startled noise, almost a squawk, and he immediately fights off Orochimaru's grip. "What the hell was that!" he demands angrily.

Orochimaru glances back at him, coyly, head tilted to one side. "You know, Jiraiya. You should have died."

Jiraiya rubs at his throat. "…the fuck?" he mutters, almost to himself, but his eyes are locked with Orochimaru's. He pales, a little, at that gaze, and moves farther away out of instinct. He's trapped, and he knows it. He's prey, little more than a single morsel, not enough to substitute for a meal, but tasty enough regardless. He can't run, because running would attract the _beast _and then he _knows _he's dead.

And then Jiraiya shakes himself like a wolf, eyes narrowing. "Asshole," he growls. "Told you not to use your freaky eyes on me or I'll rip 'em out with my bare hands."

"I should have let you die," Orochimaru continues. "You're alive because of me."

"Actually, it's because of Tsunade, in case you missed it, jerk."

Orochimaru merely shrugs slowly, and he hates the feel of the scratchy hospital gown against his bare back and fights down an immediate longing for his own clothes, so he can feel safe in his own skin once again. "Tsunade was almost out of chakra. I loaned her some of mine."

Jiraiya opens and closes his mouth several times like a fish out of water, and then he sits back suspiciously and his jaw juts to one side like it can sometimes when he's being particularly stubborn. One hand is clasped to his knee and his elbow is askew in the same general direction as his jaw. It's all very asymmetrical. "…That's what this is about? You're being an ass because you had to help a friend in trouble? Fuckin' jackass."

"You're not my friend," Orochimaru tells him firmly.

"Whatever. Be at my house at eight, or you'll miss supper."

"Hm."

* * *

Supper, in Jiraiya's terms, consists of whatever can be scrounged from his cupboards. Orochimaru contents himself with a bread-and-butter sandwich, while Jiraiya scarfs down a plate of questionable-looking sushi he'd rescued from somewhere in his refrigerator.

Jiraiya's house is small, but secure. Far enough away from Konoha that he won't be bothered by people, but still close enough to avoid being cut off completely. He's built it himself, rather than live in the old house of his clan, which he left to his younger brother, with his less-than-gracious blessings. It has one room, and a loft above it where he sleeps. There's a single window overlooking nothing in particular, but it's at the right angle to catch the sunrise, although Orochimaru's sure Jiraiya's never up that early. Jiraiya is very proud of his place, despite the omnipresent clutter. He collects things like a crow, shiny things or pretty things or little bits of lingerie, although Orochimaru isn't going to ask where he's found so much of the latter. He doesn't think he'd like the answer.

Jiraiya is currently in the loft, which extends only halfway across the house, and he's laying on his futon, head and arms dangling down into the main body of the living room/kitchenette, watching as Orochimaru makes a half-hearted attempt at cleaning up.

"Sorry about the mess," he says unapologetically. "We don't spend much time home, eh?"

Orochimaru gives up halfway through a load of dishes and retreats to another futon strategically placed smack dab in the center of nowhere, looks up at Jiraiya and purses his lips in disapproval.

Jiraiya reads his expression effortlessly, pushes himself off of his own futon and leaps down into the living room, landing with a flourish, arms held parallel to the floor. And then he stretches and sinks down to neatly cross-legged, one elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand. He essays a serious expression and glowers importantly at Orochimaru. Seconds tick by, and then minutes.

"Oy, the flat-chested one is gonna come over later. She said she'd bring food," he says idly, just to break the silence. His hair, spiked by his extended period of hanging upside down, is only just allowing gravity to flatten it back out. Orochimaru bites back a sarcastic comment about hair gel and about how baths are for other uses than spying on women.

Jiraiya fidgets. Looks down at his broad hands. At all his new little nicks and scars and scrapes. At the left thumbnail which has never grown back properly after it was torn out by an interrogator. Back to Orochimaru. Finally, he slams his hands down on the tatami mat in front of him and glares. "What do you want from me? You want me to thank you? Fine, whatever, thanks. If you're going to be this pissy about it, don't ever do it again, all right!"

Orochimaru doesn't look at him, although Jiraiya's posture and attitude are demanding him to do so.

"But if you're going to be like that," Jiraiya continues in a dark, trembling voice. Orochimaru knows it's shaking with rage and not with some weak, lesser emotion. With Jiraiya, either you can't turn him on or you can't turn him off, and now he's stuck in overdrive. "Just keep in mind that I'd save _your _sorry ass."

The dark-haired boy stiffens imperceptibly, and stands. His hands are fisted at his sides, and his jaw is clenched. Jiraiya stands as well, and he towers over his companion by a hand's span of inches. Jiraiya is broad and gangly whereas Orochimaru is small and sleek; the contrast is made sharper by Jiraiya's ruddy complexion and Orochimaru's pale skin.

There's a knock at the door just then, interrupting their vicious glaring match, and Tsunade barges in without waiting for approval. "Anybody naked?" she calls cheerfully, her arms full of groceries. She pauses as she senses the tension in the room, her healer's intuition not about to fail her just so she can stay blind to her comrade's plight, and then she kicks her smile up another few watts, trots over to Jiraiya and dumps her burden into his arms. "Put it away," she tells him. "_Properly. _If I find you've put a jug of milk in the cupboard again, I'm going to kick your lazy ass."

Jiraiya makes a face at her and retreats to do her bidding. Tsunade glances sheepishly at Orochimaru, and she rubs the back of her neck with one hand. "Ah…"

"Forget it," he tells her, although he doesn't want her to. If he could, he'd make her live with her guilt at hitting him for the rest of her life. He wants her to _bleed _for what she did. But he doesn't want to be the one to make it happen.

She smiles tentatively at him just as Jiraiya bounds back out of his kitchenette, sake cups in hand. Tsunade knows and uses a very effective henge to appear legal drinking age, and thus, this is how they spend most of their evenings. Jiraiya and Tsunade will get slobbering drunk and Orochimaru will be left to hold their hair out of their faces as they vomit up the remnants of whatever meal they'd eaten last. In Jiraiya's case, the sushi, it might not be such a bad idea.

Jiraiya avoids looking at him as he pours sake for all of them. They sit on the ragged little tatami mat in the center of his house, and Tsunade slams back the first cup, shuddering at the sour taste. "It never tastes any better, does it?" she asks wryly, as she holds out her hand for another. "Ah! Jiraiya! I bet I can drink twice as much as you and not get half as drunk!"

"You're on!"

They're children, Orochimaru decides, as he looks at each of their faces in turn. They're children playing at being adults. They drink because they think it's the only thing they can do. They drink because it's how adults spend their twilight hours. Tsunade's fourteen and she hasn't been a virgin in months. The same would be true of Jiraiya, if he were actually capable of seducing a woman. Or, Orochimaru supposes, a man.

The three of them are _children, _and they're playing dress-up with masks so finely wrought that only he can see the seams.

He sips at his first cup as Jiraiya goes onto his third. Tsunade's on her fifth, but she shows signs of slowing down at long last.

"I don't want to do this forever," she says quietly. Tsunade is always a deadly sober drunk, as if the alcohol makes her more serious. It's stripped away the first mask, the layer of a cheerful, buoyant and sometimes volatile healer.

Jiraiya squints at her, as if his eyes are having trouble focusing. "Eh?"

Orochimaru starts building a pyramid with their discarded cups.

"This," she repeats. "Fighting. Killing. I like helping people, but I'd rather not have people to help, because this…this is war, right? This is war and there's people dying and I can't…I can't do anything about everyone. Either I want to have the power to change the world, or I want it to stay the same. I don't know anymore. Gimme another." She gestures for the bottle but Orochimaru stills Jiraiya's generous hand.

Tsunade frowns at him. "Don't you interfere, Orochimaru. Jiraiya! 'Nuther one, if ya please."

"I'm not interfering," he says tightly, in controlled annoyance. Under normal circumstances, she'd be able to detect the menace in his voice but now her mind runs roughshod over it. "I'm making sure you're conscious tomorrow. We should have another new mission soon." He takes the bottle away from Jiraiya and sets it down in front of him, daring both his teammates to so much as grab for it. He's broken bones for less.

Jiraiya laughs like a hyena, like there's something particularly funny about what he's said or done, which earns him a glare as well. The tall boy sobers and slouches and sips at his cup, the hilarity stripped from the situation almost as suddenly as it was injected.

"I agree," he says to Tsunade. "Let's make a pact. At thirty, if…" he pauses, and Orochimaru fills in the blanks. _If we're all still alive. _"Nonono. At thirty, let's get out of this. I'll open a classy brothel, and you two can be attendants!" he announces, slamming his now-empty cup on the mat. Tsunade smacks him and sends him reeling backwards with a whimper. "What?" he asks indignantly. "You're a woman, Tsunade-_chan_, and Orochimaru…well, he's feminine enough, if you put him in a dress…and he does that funny thing with his tongue…" In evidence, Jiraiya flicks his tongue out and wags it up and down.

Tsunade giggles. Orochimaru merely sighs, and topples the pyramid with a finger.

Jiraiya swings his gaze around lazily and pins Orochimaru like a bug to a display card. "You!" he announces like he wasn't sure who he was talking to. "What do you think, 'bout all this?"

Orochimaru flexes his hands once, looking down at the veins and tendons standing stark against his skin. Years of training have tightened the sinews of his body, leaving him with a gaunt, almost emaciated look that makes his slenderness a grotesquerie instead of a grace.

"I don't know what I want," he says quietly, still staring at his hands. "Power. To change things. To _do_ things. I don't want people to be able to order me around, and I don't want to have to do what they say. I want to do things _my _way, and damn the consequences! One day I'll have all that, and once I get it, I won't let it go." He'll hold it with his own two hands, and keep it close enough to kiss and his world will be stable and balanced forever.

But forever is only as long as a life. Forever is sometimes only until the next sunrise, or moonrise, or season. Forever is fleeting.

He clenches his hands into fists.

Jiraiya and Tsunade exchange glances that belie their drunkenness.

"I want you both to promise me something," Tsunade says suddenly, snapping the tension like a fine garroting wire, or a neck. Both are equally easy to a ninja. "All right? Promise?"

"Well, you gotta tell us what it _is _first, eh?" Jiraiya jokes as he elbows Orochimaru in the ribs. The shorter boy grimaces, because Jiraiya doesn't put a leash on his strength when he's had a few drinks, and he hits harder than he knows sometimes.

Tsunade beams, drains the dregs of her cup and sets the little vessel atop her head, bobbing about to keep it from falling off. "Promisssssse…" she says, drawing out the word intentionally to keep them steeped in anticipation, as if it could sweeten the flavor. "Promise you'll become the best shinobi you can be. I don't want to lose you guys, either of you. Even though you're stupid…" She glares at Jiraiya. "Or sneaky…" And now at Orochimaru. "You're my team. And we gotta look out for each other. So let's make a pact. To be the best." She holds out her hand and it hovers lightly over Orochimaru's toppled pyramid of sake cups.

Jiraiya, after a moment's hesitation, does the same, and both of them turn expectant faces to Orochimaru.

He sits, and he thinks. He's already made it his goal to become the best he can be. He doesn't need their stupid pact to force himself to achieve his goals. He doesn't need _them. _They're open and earnest and _honest _and he's already seen one of them come so close to death that, by rights, he shouldn't be here and breathing. Luck watches out for idiots for fools, and Jiraiya is both, most of the time, when he's not busy pretending he's an adult.

But they both look so hopeful, so young, so much like the children they've never been allowed to be, and so he extends his hand, allows it to hover a moment just beyond theirs, and he takes a breath.

Before he can do anything further, Sarutobi-sensei kicks the door open and bursts inside. "All of you," he pants unevenly, half-collapsing. Tsunade is on her feet immediately, and chakra flares in her hand, which she moves over her chest. Her transformation is a smack to the face, immediately all vestiges of her drunkenness fade, and she darts to Sarutobi and catches him before he falls.

"Sensei?" she yelps, as she takes stock of the blood staining his uniform, and of the kunai lodged into his back near his spine.

"I'll be fine," he grunts in irritation as he reaches around behind him and removes the dagger. "You three are needed, Konoha's under attack."

Orochimaru studies their sensei curiously, as if for the first time. He's never seen him as old, but rather as timeless, because no matter what has happened or what will happen, Sarutobi seems much the same as always. But Orochimaru hasn't failed to notice how that streak of grey near his temples wasn't always there.

It hits him like a load of bricks and if he were standing, he may have fallen down. Their sensei is getting old. Not terribly old, but old_er_. He's a Hokage, and he's aging. He's not nearly as immortal as the stone face carved into the mountains tucked behind Konoha. He's not perfect, not infallible. He's human. A talented one, yes, but his mortality is a pulsing, living, breathing thing and it, unlike the shell it wears, will never stop or cease or need rest.

Orochimaru stands, dusts his clothes off with a careful hand, and he walks past Tsunade and Sarutobi-sensei and towards the battle. He ignores Jiraiya's shout of 'Wait up!' and Sarutobi-sensei's entreaty regarding his promise to keep from summoning his snakes. Tsunade says nothing at all.

Orochimaru is beyond caring. All he wants to do is fight. To fight until time stands still.

* * *

Sarutobi escorts them back to Konoha, and they hide a moment in the shadows beside a building that was once an eatery. And like the good little ninjas they are, and they watch and they wait. The enemy has sent a suicide squad, and it's not their first. Their goal is infiltration and as much damage as possible, but every shinobi is expendable. They know no vital information, they have no special techniques. They're talented, but only moderately so. The battle would be nothing, if there weren't so damned _many _of them.

One of the enemy shinobi ignites an explosive tag around a makeshift bomb of shuriken and lobbies it up and into an apartment building. A Konoha ninja arcs past and takes the hit instead, and his body slams backwards through the apartment's glass windows. There's screams of fear and pain from inside, and the glass streams down in rainbow kaleidoscopes, the shards catching light as they fall.

Sarutobi touches a hand to Orochimaru's shoulder and gestures him off in one direction, indicating that he should take Tsunade with him. Tactically, it's a good decision. Orochimaru will have the healer, because they are nowhere near Sarutobi-sensei's level, and Sarutobi will have the most incompetent, if any of them could be called that, member of the group so he can look out for him. If things go as planned, they'll all come out alive.

Orochimaru grabs Tsunade's wrist and runs in the opposite direction, down one of Konohagakure's alleyways. He skids to a halt just in time to avoid one of the unmarked enemy ninjas, and the both of them spring away simultaneously and in different directions. Tsunade scampers up a wall and to a balcony, and Orochimaru skids backwards along the pavement as the enemy kunoichi takes a swipe at him with some sort of flail.

It might have connected with him, had not Tsunade intervened. "Kagami no Jutsu!" she half-shouts, and a wall of liquid metal coalesces in front of him from nowhere and shatters with the force of the blow. Her mirror is a nifty trick, but useful only once. Orochimaru himself is unharmed, and he lunges at the startled kunoichi, who doesn't have time to counterattack. His technique, hidden snake hands, pins her to the wall and Orochimaru smiles at her. Smiles and licks the blade of his kunai and presses it to her neck. She struggles and snarls at him, but he's in control here, and she can't _escape…_

"Orochimaru!" Tsunade calls his name once, and that's enough. He flinches and dispatches the woman immediately, as swiftly as possible, the kunai cutting through her throat and into the base of her spine and her central nervous system. She twitches once and falls limp, and he retracts the snakes and shakes his head to clear it. Tsunade leaps down beside him, wraps an arm around him and leaps back up to her vantage point with him in tow.

"Are you all right?" she asks, noting that he's clutching the side of his head with stark-white fingers.

"Fine. Go!"

She nods once, tersely, because she knows that hesitation here will get them both dead, and then she springs away and races up the side of the half-deteriorated wall to the roof.

After another precious moment spent to gather his thoughts and collect his wits, Orochimaru leaps after her.

She's nowhere in sight when he arrives at the top, and he looks all around and then up, takes note of her position on top of a punctured water tower, spilling its life's blood into the chill autumn air. He joins her a moment later and together they survey the area.

They notice the academy at the same time. All that can be seen from that general direction is a great billowing cascade of smoke spiraling to the sky. "Nawaki-!" Tsunade shrieks, and immediately she lets her heart rule her head. Orochimaru grabs her by a handful of her long hair and she jerks at the end of her tether, twists just enough to glare at him. Her lips are pretty and pink and pressed into a firm line, and she fumbles a kunai out of her weapon canteen. "Don't make me," she growls as she palms the weapon and directs the point at him. Orochimaru merely looks at her.

"Think logically," he says calmly. "At the first sign of attack, the children would have been vacated elsewhere. You aren't needed there."

Tsunade's eyes are hard, and she tries to take another step. She drags Orochimaru with her, but he's not about to let go if he has to take her bloody scalp with him. Then, in one swift, fluid motion that he can't follow with his eyes, she severs the lifeline, and strands of her long blonde hair fan around him and to the ground. She darts off like a jackrabbit, desperate and determined and unthinking.

But, Orochimaru reasons, she's a big sister. Were their situations reversed, he could have done nothing less. So he tosses the ratty handful of hair to the ground and chases her.

Tsunade is already digging through the rubble when Orochimaru gets to her, heaving aside monstrous chunks of cement with next to no effort, at least that she shows. There are tears streaming down her face as she works and Orochimaru stands off to one side and merely watches her, until a well-timed segment of wall forces him to move out of the way or risk being squashed. When he moves, she notices him, and she whips around and stands there, hands clenched into fists.

"Help me!" she yells at him. "Stop being so fucking heartless and _help _for a change!"

She tips her head down until her ragged bangs shadow her face, but he can see tears dripping off her chin, and her shoulders are trembling. Of course, she's fourteen and she thinks her baby brother is somewhere under tones of rock and rubble, and because she's Tsunade, she's not going to be satisfied until she either finds him or until she's cleared every piece of rock out of the area.

Orochimaru steps closer, catches her up in his arms and holds her awkwardly for a moment. She stiffens against him and stands rigid, trying to hold back her sobs, and then she subsides. Maybe she's not as sober as her hastily-applied medical procedure would have the rest of the world believe.

"Stop," he tells her gently, or as gently as he can, and he holds her at arm's length long enough for her to smudge the tears off her face. "And think a moment. Standard procedure. You were at this academy a few years ago. In the event of an attack, what do they do?"

She sniffs, and rubs her nose on the inside of one wrist. "They take them to the monument."

"Right. Do you really think any of our teachers would let our enemy do this to our school while there were still children inside?" She closes her eyes, and he knows she's thinking of Yamada-sensei and of Uchiha-sensei and remembering how the two of them had sworn not to give up until they were dead. Uchiha-sensei had added, with a smirk and a wink, that he'd come back from the dead if he had to make sure he didn't go back on his word.

"What now?" she asks next, like he has all the answers. Her voice doesn't break, though, and Orochimaru takes that as a good enough sign that this too shall pass.

"Now we fight."

* * *

Criticism? 


	3. Smile

Softly Say Goodnight

-

AN: Ack, such a marvelous response from everyone. Adoration to you all! I'd love to thank everyone individually, but that'd take up a lot of space (And since I tend to babble on about such things…) so I'll just gush and get it over with! Bwahah.

Written in four hours, total, and unedited.

-

_Now we fight._

Sometimes, he dreams like this. It's not something he pays attention to all that often, because as far as he knows, everyone dreams.

His dreams are monochromatic, streaked with crimsons and vermilions and pastel-pinks to hide the darkness. Shot through with fire and ice stained red with blood. He dreams about the way he embeds a kunai in someone's eye and how, when he pulls it out, the eyeball comes with it. He dreams about eviscerating someone, and in his dream, it's just a child. Sometimes it looks like his sister.

Those nights, he wakes up screaming.

But he's not screaming now. There's no point, so he merely functions on as low a level as he possibly can without slipping up and dying. Everything is mechanical, cleanly efficient and frighteningly fragile. Time splinters away from him like it's caught up in a shimmering net of spider silk and it's all he can do to just keep moving.

So he kills. He kicks a woman to her knees, grabs up a handful of her long hair and jerks her head back to slit her throat. The spray of blood arcs all the way to Tsunade, who scrubs a hand across her eyes to clear her vision. It's not hard at all to split open the cartilage of a windpipe, and the woman gurgles as she falls. He licks flecks of liquid life from his lips and pretends he doesn't like the taste.

And then he keeps fighting to purge his cenotaph of sins. Maybe if he bleeds enough, maybe it can wash it all away.

Orochimaru's strength and stamina are not indefinite, and one of his opponents is still fresh-faced and devoid of blood splatters. The man summons clones, kage bunshin no jutsu, and three of them together attack Orochimaru. He stumbles as one of the clone's kunai catches him in the shoulder and forces him back yet another step. Orochimaru smirks, uses the pain as a focal point, hones in on it and retaliates with an acid jutsu that dispels the clones back to nothingness. He jerks the kunai out of his shoulder, flips it until the hilt is at his palm instead of his fingertips and throws it. His opponent, thinking he's being clever, catches it and can't release it in time to avoid the explosive tag tacked to it. He falls with a guttural shriek, half of his face torn away from the force of the explosion.

Tsunade is and always will be more of a brawler than a strategist. While he's busy using trickery and genjutsu and the barest hint of ninjutsu, she's busy tearing people in half with her manic strength, or splitting the ground and causing tremors that makes her opponent's knees buckle. Orochimaru, watching her from the corner of one eye, follows her movements and reacts accordingly. When Tsunade's hand impacts against the earth, he leaps into the air to avoid the inevitable concussions.

Tsunade is now somewhere to his right, and she's making little 'ha-ha-ha' noises as she pants for breath in the midst of a hard-won reprieve, like the calm in the center of the hurricane. He covers her automatically, seeing as how he knows she can't take care of herself, and he stops a shuriken in mid-air with the loop at the hilt of a kunai, narrows his eyes and smiles. There's a tangle of intestines around his ankle and he pauses to slash through them rather than merely try to extricate himself. Time, time, time, time is the goddess here, and she deals in the only currency that matters. One more breath, one more heartbeat, one more moment to tell your secrets to the world.

Tsunade recovers enough to resume fighting and she leaps beside him. They fight back to back, tooth and nail, against the three remaining enemies that they've found, until Tsunade gets caught up in a whirlwind jutsu laced with kunai and shuriken that slash mercilessly at various key points of her anatomy. Keeping her head, she deflects as many of them as she can, but one hits her in the small of her back and immediately thereafter her movements become sluggish, less evasive.

Orochimaru blinks with realization. They're going to lose. It's a novel concept to him, because he's used to being the best and the brightest that Konohagakure has to offer, and so the fact that his defeat is now _palpable _makes the stakes that much higher. It's his _reputation _that's being tested, not just his skills.

Tsunade hits the ground when the jutsu releases her, and Orochimaru stands still a moment, watching his opponents warily. He could have caught her, but to do so would have sacrificed some of the precious ground he's gained. She coughs up blood and without the strength to scream, merely groans and tries to stand. She makes it to her knees and then collapses again, and the blood staining the back of her shirt spreads like a malignant cancer. If he leaves her there, they'll kill her. If he takes any move that is not directly to her side to protect her, they'll kill her.

His eyes flicker back to the three remaining Kumogakure shinobi, he licks his lips and starts to smile.

They're counting on him going to save a comrade, because really, who wouldn't? These are people you've trained and slept and played beside, these are people that have seen you into adulthood, that have, in Tsunade's case, patched you up when you were injured and smacked you and told you to shut the hell up when you were being an idiot.

But she, like him, is only human. And so he does not go to her side, he doesn't make any move at all to protect her like he knows she would have done for him. Instead, his hands race through a series of seals, _Boar, dog, pig, ox, ox, dog…_ and he springs to one side, further away from Tsunade, leaving her wide open for attack. "Sanseiu no Jutsu!" Acid rain, one of his deadliest techniques, and one that requires the most precision. Everything it touches will be scoured to the bone, and there's little that can defend against it. With chakra, he directs it towards the group, and then he tilts his fist to one side and releases the onslaught once he has the target in his sights. He's a boy. A boy just a little older than him, with a deep, puckered scar down one cheek and mismatched blue-brown eyes. They're strange details to notice of someone about to die.

The acid takes his leg first, searing the flesh and taking minute rat-like bites from the bone beneath. The boy shrieks, screams and tries to run away, but he forgets that he's now missing a limb and falls heavily to the ground. Neither of his companions move to help _him, _either, Orochimaru thinks with smug satisfaction. He watches detachedly as the acid eats further up, to his thighs, his abdomen. The droplets punch little holes in his stomach and he screams in such an aching, _guttural _manner without the faintest trace of humanity.

By the time the technique has gotten to his lungs, he stops screaming, because he has nothing with which to do so.

Orochimaru is not cruel, but curious. Before his family's death, he could barely defend himself, so great was his desire to refrain from shedding blood. Afterwards, death became a fascinating phantom sepulcher that loomed just beyond his grasp. Things, and the nature of things and of their deaths gained a sort of mysterious allure.

_You have nice eyes. _

Those eyes are dark with bloodlust now, and as he raises them to judge his remaining two opponents, he keeps smiling.

From that point on, there is no clear right and wrong, no light and dark. Nothing exists save the blood and the hunt and the _kill, _and although he realizes at some juncture in time that he's crushed someone's neck with a snake's hungry jaws, he has neither the time nor the inclination to care. There's blood in his mouth, a stark reminder of that someone's mortality, but _he's _not the one doing the bleeding and that makes everything okay.

All too soon, there's only one opponent left, and judging by his countenance and the way he holds himself like a panther primed for a strike, he's probably the most talented. A sacrificial offering on the silver platter, the leader of a plethora of pawns. He's quicker, stronger, and Orochimaru is tired. _So very, very tired…_

But Orochimaru takes a step forwards, and then another. The man, gauging him, takes one step back and then shifts his left foot out and traces a half-circle with his toe as he does so he can find the center of his balance. "Who are you?" he asks at length as Orochimaru stands there and smiles like the world isn't a kaleidoscope of carnage.

"Orochimaru," he responds, not seeing a reason to withhold the information.

"Kousuiryou." The pale-haired Cloud shinobi wraps one hand about the hilt of a katana and gives him a solemn nod. He's young, too, Orochimaru realizes with something that might have been surprise in a lesser person. With him, it's merely another little detail. Absorbed like sunshine, forgotten like shade. Kousuiryou snaps the blade from its sheath and it glistens wetly, almost as if it's swathed in mist. "You fight well, so let's fight fair."

Orochimaru isn't sure why he nods back. And then, as the man kneels beside the last of his crew, the one whose throat Orochimaru had crushed, he touches her broken cheek and smiles a little, and his cheek dimples in one side as he does so. His eyes are grave and his smile is sweet and everything about him is so, _too _damned young and, worst of all, Orochimaru _recognizes_ that look.

He doesn't like to think about an enemy's humanity. Sometimes it's like looking in the mirror.

Orochimaru has never, _ever _liked mirrors.

* * *

A short time later, Sarutobi-sensei finds him staring blankly at a mutilated corpse. Jiraiya, nursing a dislocated shoulder, looks on and tries not to act surprised. Orochimaru's hands are swathed in crimson up to his elbows. Clotted blood dangles in candy-colored strings from his fingers as he holds them out as if for a clinical study, and something about the way it all happens seems so…_alien. _

The man at his feet is missing his face.

Jiraiya grabs him and shakes him and shouts something about honor and fuckin' _dignity _but Orochimaru just smiles. "It's just a mirror," he murmurs in a tone that might have been sweet if it wasn't for the acrid _enmity _interlaced within it. "Just a mirror. It's broken, but it can be fixed, if you have the pieces." He giggles, a thin, high noise somehow more grating than nails on a chalkboard. Jiraiya, not knowing what to do, falls back a step and looks to their sensei. The look on his face is heartbreaking.

_What's wrong?_ he asks with the set of his eyes and the frown on his lips. _And how the fuck do I fix it?_

Sarutobi doesn't know the answer, so to give the illusion of doing something; he walks with purpose to Tsunade's side. The young kunoichi is barely breathing as he turns her onto her back and presses one ear to her chest. There's a rattle from deep within, and vaguely, he wonders if she has a punctured lung. Her lips are red with a fine mist of blood.

"She'll be fine," he tells both of his young apprentices, neither of which is listening. Sandaime isn't too startled at that, because even he knows his words are made of aught but air.

It's just something to do, because there's nothing else to say.

* * *

Jiraiya's looking at him like he's killed his best friend. Dimly, Orochimaru hears their sensei announce that Tsunade will live, and he suppresses a pang of disappointment. If she died, it would mean various things. She wouldn't bother him any more, she wouldn't quarrel with Jiraiya, and he would no longer have a demi-competent comrade to fight at his side. It would also mean she wouldn't have to see the rest of this war.

He still doesn't know if her little brother is alive, and knows that the rhetoric he'd fed her earlier was not a truthful reassurance, it was meant to captivate her attention and to keep her from doing something stupid.

"…You're hurt," Jiraiya says abruptly, reaching for his injured shoulder. Orochimaru stills him with a hand to his wrist, and when the taller boy looks down and sees, _sees, _for the first time the sticky, congealed blood, he recoils instantly and jerks his sleeve down over the red handprint as if he wants to forget it was ever there. He rubs at the fabric of the sleeve over the mark and just looks at Orochimaru.

"You're hurt, too," the dark-haired boy returns evenly, with a hint of that selfsame smile.

"…I…yeah, whatever. Just got my shoulder knocked out of place, I'll be…be fine." Jiraiya meets his eyes, and Orochimaru doesn't even try to use his paralysis technique on him. Orochimaru notes with some amusement that standing in front of a corpse so badly mangled that it's barely recognizable as human is getting to his companion more than his eyes ever could. Jiraiya's shifting uneasily from one foot to the other, looking anywhere, everywhere but at the body or at Orochimaru himself.

"Did you do that?" Jiraiya asks finally, toeing the corpse.

"Yes."

"…_Why?"_

Orochimaru looks down at the body, at the crimson streaks of muscle and bone on the skinless face, at the gaping mouth and bulging eyes and at all goddamned _blood. _When he looks back at Jiraiya, his smile is finally gone. "…I…don't know."

It's the most truthful thing he's said in a long time.

* * *

The monument complex is a vast labyrinth created during the reign of the previous two Hokage, with many false ends and cleverly-hidden traps. The enemies that find it usually never find their way out again, because if they aren't dealt with by the shinobi within, they stumble into a trap. One might think that a stray child might stumble upon one of those precautionary snares, but these children are ninja children, and they know how to follow orders.

Sarutobi carries Tsunade to the monument, and sends Jiraiya and Orochimaru ahead to make ready a medical team. For someone other than Tsunade, it might have been too late, but she's one of the best young healers Konohagakure has to offer and losing her would be an offensive blow they wouldn't be able to ignore. So they'll work and they'll try to fix her, because of all the people she can save.

Once the medics are alerted, the two boys walk the halls in silence. Jiraiya makes some remark about how he wants to check up on the children, but his unspoken motivation lies more with his wanting to see how his younger brother has fared.

Orochimaru doesn't know much about Hatake Sakumo, because Jiraiya never talks about him. What he does know is that he's a very skilled academy student, soon to be a graduate, and that some people are already talking about how he'll be the first of his age-mates to make Jounin.

It's a war. One doesn't _make _Jounin, one is coerced into it, and if one has a single sense of duty or a scrap of honor, they take it because they can't _not _take it. They take it because if they don't, someone else of lesser talent with a smaller chance for survival will take it and _they _will die, and that sort of guilt is the type that eats away at a person at night relentlessly and without reprieve.

They wander along the hallways until they come to an intersection, and at the same time they both see Uchiha-sensei leaning against a wall. As far as aesthetics go, the Jounin is one of the most beautiful men around. He's in possession of a refined sort of elegance, likely accredited to his lean figure and sharp features. His hair is long and black, kept in a braid. His eyes are narrow, and there's a tattoo of a black and violet dragon on his cheek, stenciled in to cover a burn scar. He's also an avid smoker, and he's just lighting up a cigarette as the two boys make their way towards him.

"Hey, hold up," he announces, pushing himself away from the wall to stand, arms akimbo, in their path. "Name and purpose, if you'd be so kind." He looks exceedingly stern, and already his eyes are flashing with the pinwheel of the sharingan. The light from the cigarette illuminates the tattoo on his cheek. He's been lightly injured in the battle, and one of his forearms is swathed in bandages.

"Hatake Jiraiya," Jiraiya answers before Orochimaru can, a peculiar nuance of rivalry, a declaration of 'Look at me, I'm more important'.

Uchiha-sensei studies him intently for a moment, and then exhales a puff of smoke and steps back to wave a hand, allowing them passage. His eyes fade back to the deep black-brown of all or most Uchiha. "You kids have sure grown up."

"Yeah…" Jiraiya grins, and Orochimaru has never seen it less sincere. "Thanks, Uchiha-sensei."

"_Youki," _he corrects firmly. "Youki-senpai if you must. Didn't I teach you guys better than that? Yeesh. Hurry up and go on through, we're not really supposed to let anyone down to see the students. I take it you want to check up on your kid brother?"

Jiraiya frowns and doesn't reply, so Orochimaru seizes the opportunity to speak. "No, actually. We're here for Tsunade's younger sibling, Nawaki."

"Ah…" Youki gives them both an appraising look. Something of the way he sets his lips into a thin, amused line tells Orochimaru that he doesn't believe that, but he doesn't contest it either. "Fair enough, fair enough. But if you're not out in five or so minutes, there could be trouble, so hurry up, eh? And tell Yamada-_sama_," that he says with the barest tone of amusement, "I say hello. And while you're at it, ask her if she's made up her mind about going to dinner with me or not."

It's strange, but such things don't seem as callous as they could have. How many of Uchiha Youki's friends or family members have died today, that he can still _joke _about things? A ninja must possess a heart that never shows tears, but is the only feasible answer to do the extreme reverse, instead?

Orochimaru supposes everyone has their own unique way of coping with war. But that doesn't mean he has to like or respect or appreciate it.

"Thank you, Uchiha-sensei. I will." Orochimaru says gravely, with a half-bow.

Jiraiya merely grunts and sets off down the hall, his pace a little quicker than previously. The sensei calls after them good-naturedly, '_Youki,' _and then leaves it at that.

"How long has it been since you've seen your brother?" Orochimaru asks in idle curiosity once they're out of Youki's earshot. One will never learn anything if they do not grasp after fleeting purchases of knowledge in the dark. One will never become anything _without_ knowledge, and he's willing to dig a little if it means getting something that he wants, even if he has to tunnel straight into someone's personal hell.

Jiraiya slows, and casts him a sideways glare. "What's it to you?"

Orochimaru shrugs, and brushes a finger past one porcelain-pale cheek. Jiraiya notes the action and flinches, probably remembering how not too long ago, those hands had been drenched in blood. Are his imaginings really so horrid? Probably. Orochimaru at last puts a leash on his inquisitiveness and doesn't ask how many men Jiraiya's killed today.

Nawaki is ten years old, the same age as Sakumo. But whereas the latter is a skilled young ninja in his own right, the former is more of a prankster, like some sort of mythic Kitsune. Both of them are sitting on a crate, and Nawaki's trying to get the other, white-haired boy to play paper, rock, scissors with him. Sakumo is making an attempt at acting cool and aloof to attract the attention of a nearby girl, who every so often will lift her eyes and smile shyly at him.

Jiraiya takes in the scene and exhales in a low, long breath of barely-perceptible relief before he snorts. "Pa-the-tic," he enunciates clearly, and loud enough so that Sakumo will hear him. Immediately the younger boy's cheeks flush with crimson and he glares at Jiraiya unrestrainedly.

"What the hell do _you_ want?" he asks, his voice a low, childish growl. He's already reaching for a kunai, but in less time than it takes to breathe, Jiraiya has him disarmed, one arm wrapped around his neck in a choke-hold that would require Sakumo's dislocating his own arm to get out of it.

"Not you, that's for sure," Jiraiya tells him disdainfully. "Fight your enemies, brat, not your betters." He releases him then, shoves him forwards and Sakumo leaps from the crate to avoid falling flat on his face.

"You bastard-!"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever." Jiraiya rolls his eyes and glances at Nawaki, who has watched the entire exchange with wide eyes. "Ah…"

Nawaki, noting the fact that Tsunade is not with her team, swallows abruptly. "Neechan…?"

"Injured," Orochimaru supplies smoothly. "Badly."

"What?" Nawaki scrambles to his feet and clenches his fists. "Where?"

Yamada-sensei, attracted by the noise, creeps over. She's a quiet sort of kunoichi with shortly-cropped blonde hair and pale blue eyes. She's four years older than Uchiha Youki, and his equal in every way a kunoichi can equal a shinobi. She's also an expert in silent assassination and can refine chakra strings to beyond the strength of any garrote Orochimaru has ever seen. She looks at Jiraiya and then at Orochimaru, and sets a hand on Nawaki's shoulder. The boy fights her grip and she flexes her fingers, holding him in place with minimal effort. "Has something happened to Tsunade-chan?" she asks softly, the pitch of her voice making everyone within her immediate vicinity strain to hear it.

"She was injured," Orochimaru says in irritation, annoyed at having to repeat himself. "I assumed that bringing Nawaki to her would have a positive effect on her…" Jiraiya _glares _at him, subtle and snarling with just a slight crease to his brow, and Orochimaru finishes smoothly, "Recovery."

"Leggo of me, sensei!" Nawaki growls at Yamada, who blinks like a startled animal and releases him. "I wanna see my sister! Take me to her _right now!"_

Jiraiya crouches down to be on the level with Nawaki, and sets a hand on his shoulder, the same one Yamada-sensei's tentative touch has just vacated. "Hey, hey, kid. Tsunade-hime is gonna be all right. She's just a little banged up, is all." He grins and ruffles Nawaki's hair, but the boy shoves him away. Startled, Jiraiya almost overbalances and topples over, but a shinobi's lightning-fast reflexes keeps him on the balls of his feet. Nawaki pushes past him and scampers off down the dimly-lit hall, and Yamada-sensei purses her thin lips.

"You always were disrupting my class, Jiraiya," she says in some sort of ill-conceived amusement. "Go after him, and see that he does not wander into any trouble, please."

Jiraiya stands and gives her a nod and a lazy salute. "Sensei." He gives one last look to Sakumo, who folds his arms and looks elsewhere. He snorts again and heads off after Nawaki, and Sakumo glares at his retreating back.

"Uchiha-sensei says hello," Orochimaru says after a moment. "And he wants to know about dinner."

Yamada-sensei blushes and touches a hand to her cheek as if her pale fingers could chase it away. "Tell him I would not go to dinner with a coward who cannot ask me himself." She smiles, slightly. "And tell him also to stop smoking."

So mundane. So human. There's death all around them and they can still look to the future. But for any number of nameless, faceless shinobi, after today there will _be _no future. No hope, no help, no life. Orochimaru's sure that in a year or two or five, Yamada-sensei and Uchiha-sensei will be married, they'll have children with sharingan of their own. Their family will be picture-perfect until one night; one of their parents won't come home.

Maybe it would be Uchiha-sensei, captured on a routine mission, tortured and then killed. Maybe it would be Yamada-sensei, shielding someone with her own body and taking a fatal hit that should have ended someone _else's _life. Or maybe one day a nameless, faceless _thing _will enter their home and slaughter the entire family except for one small boy, left alive to reap the whirlwind.

Yamada-sensei doesn't ask why he turns violently and sprints after Jiraiya. The answer is on his face, louder than any words.

* * *

As for the crack Hatake Jiraiya theory…blame the fact that Kimi no Vanilla and I noticed that they had the same hair, and how Sakumo was referred to as being 'On par' with the Sannin. Ergo, my brain ran itself in circles until the idea came to life.

…Criticism?


	4. Breathe

Softly Say Goodnight

-

AN: Um? No real comments on this chapter, save that I restarted it like, a million times before I got something I was happy with. I still don't like this chapter very much, grr.

To all the people that've reviewed, I'm very honored that you've taken the time to sit around and read this story, and even more flattered that you've reviewed. Makes my day, yes it does. And so many of the people who've read this story are people who's writing I also admire, which just makes me grin like a total idiot, yes. Anyways. Enough with the sappy stuff. On with the fic!

-

Orochimaru had graduated the academy at six. He was a Chuunin before the year was out, and a Jounin with a child's jaded eyes at eleven.

These were times of war. Children could not be spared, or else they wouldn't live to _be _spared. They had to be taught to fight, and to die, and if they couldn't handle it, they were sent out on a mission from which there would be no returning. Never mind that a frantic mother could beat her hands bloody against the door of an uncaring official. Never mind that her husband could take a similar mission with the full knowledge of where it would get him. Never mind that the people who wanted to die as martyrs, for a cause, died as dogs in a ditch instead.

Expendable, they called them. Like they weren't living, breathing people but pieces on a board. Anonymous little white pebbles plucked from a battered container and set in a formation on a go-ban.

White always goes first. (_Innocence goes first and it fades to black because the world can't keep the precedence set by perfection.)_

And sacrifices are sometimes necessary to keep the dream alive.

* * *

The true nature of Tsunade's injuries; how and why she'd received them, leaks out during the debriefing with Sandaime and Jiraiya and the council. How Orochimaru could have protected her and hadn't. Could have prevented her from being injured and didn't. He tells them, and his voice is a veritable well of calm, emotionless and frank, and across the table Sandaime is frowning, and next to him, Jiraiya is trembling with barely suppressed rage. The council members exchange arch, esoteric glances and Orochimaru flicks his tongue at one of them just to watch her squirm.

Shortly after he finishes his little speech, Sandaime nods and scribbles a something, or perhaps several somethings on a sheet of paper and without looking up, he says 'dismissed'. Orochimaru thinks it's because at the moment, Sarutobi-sensei doesn't want to meet his eyes.

He too had been shocked by the man whose face he'd torn off. Sarutobi-sensei, who's been through war and fire, famine and near-death experiences, who's waded up to his armpits through guts and gore, he's the _Sandaime Hokage _and yet the look on his face when he'd seen what Orochimaru was capable of had said it all. _He fears me, _Orochimaru notes with clinical amusement. _He fears _for_ me. _

He chokes back a hysterical sob and stands to leave. Jiraiya is already waiting by the door, impatiently tapping one geta-bound foot against the floor without rhythm or form. Orochimaru studies him and reads him and knows that he's thinking about Tsunade lying cold and pale in a hospital bed somewhere, or maybe in a casket.

Orochimaru knows which he'd prefer, but he doesn't think Jiraiya wants to hear it. Jiraiya doesn't want to hear a lot of what he has to say lately.

Orochimaru follows the white-haired boy out of the room, and before he's taken a full clear step over the threshold of the door, Jiraiya has a fist in his shirt and in his mesh undershirt, and he's jerking him off balance and with cruelty. Orochimaru lets himself be dragged to the nearest wall and slammed against it, because from the look in Jiraiya's eyes, he knows fighting would get him nowhere.

Jiraiya shoves him against the wall once, and then again, as if to make a point. And then he _snarls, _"You _bastard. _You stupid, snaky _bastard. _We _swore. _We fucking _swore _we'd protect Tsunade no matter _what _and you almost let her get _killed!"_

Delayed reaction, Orochimaru thinks. If Jiraiya had wanted to get angry with him, he could have done it on the battle field, when they were both still suffering from the rigors of the battle and from their injuries. But now both their heads are clear and yet the world around them is still so murky…

So Orochimaru smiles, because Jiraiya doesn't understand. "She's alive, is she not?"

"She's in a fucking _coma, _Orochimaru! They're pumping her so full of blood so fast that her blood vessels or whatever could fucking rupture and…and…!"

"She's Tsunade," Orochimaru reminds him, and he's annoyed that it's actually necessary to do so. Jiraiya loses control when he's angered, but he rarely gets _this _riled.

Nearby, someone is molding chakra. Orochimaru doesn't think Jiraiya notices, so he doesn't comment until a masked ANBU member leaps upon the taller boy and wrests him away from Orochimaru. Jiraiya growls and fights, until it actually registers what's been done. And then he lets himself be pinned to the floor as the ANBU presses a kunai to his throat.

"What's going on here?" she asks with authority, and her voice is slightly hollow through her rat-faced mask.

Orochimaru smiles innocently and spreads his hands as if he has no idea. Jiraiya snarls. "Fucking asshole!"

The ANBU twitches her knee a little closer to Jiraiya's groin. "Watch it," she says smoothly. "Explain why you two are getting into a fight right outside Sandaime-sama's council room, before I report the both of you." Collectively, he and Jiraiya outrank her. But then he reminds himself that ANBU are outside rank all together. They eat and breathe and shit at the Hokage's orders and they don't have to listen to anyone else.

"I'm sorry," Orochimaru says as sincerely as he can manage, and he reaches a hand for Jiraiya to take. "It's…just been a long day, that's all. Please let him up. Come, Jiraiya." Slowly, the ANBU disentangles herself from Jiraiya and stands. Her body language has been taken to an art form; she neither reveals nor denies anything. Orochimaru wishes he could see her face. And then he remembers the last time he truly _looked_ at anyone, and his hands itch and he remembers the sensation of blood vessels breaking apart from skin like grass roots from a hunk of earth. The tiny little _popping _noises, and…

"Come on," he reiterates, taking Jiraiya's hand to haul him to his feet. He bows once to the ANBU, respectful in action if not in actuality, and he drags Jiraiya outside. There are clouds roiling overhead and there's the tang of thunder in the air, crisp and metallic.

They walk for a while in silence, and neither of them really knows where they're going, and maybe neither of them really cares. Jiraiya's got his hands shoved in his pockets and his shoulders hunched and Orochimaru is looking at the ground. Walk, walk, walk, silence…

And then Jiraiya grabs his arm and jerks him into an alleyway and up a wall, and before Orochimaru knows it, they're on top of a roof. He looks down over the side and sees the streets below, and people creeping about somberly like they expect the world to end at any given time.

"It's…it's…you could at least show some fucking _remorse!" _Jiraiya says finally, at length. He sounds so desperate, and so very young. It takes a moment for Orochimaru to blink back to reality and recall what he's talking about.

"Why?" Orochimaru asks, not to be sadistic but with a sort of implacable curiosity. "She's alive. She'll recover."

"…I…" Jiraiya turns away abruptly, and he tugs a hand through his messy mop of stark white hair. His shoulder, still tender from being dislocated, he flexes and rotates. "We promised. D'you remember? Christ, we were just kids…seven or so…it was just after we got back from that mission and Tsunade almost…almost died, because she was protecting us. We were fighting that missing nin…remember?"

He does. He also remembers that Tsunade had taken those fatal hits for Jiraiya, as he looked on in blank shock, not so much unwilling to react as simply _incapable _of itHe'd stared up at her with fright and fear and she'd growled at him that she wasn't saving him; she just wanted to look good in front of Orochimaru. At some point, she'd passed out, and Jiraiya had gone ballistic. Orochimaru had had to tackle him to prevent him from a suicidal charge towards the missing-nin that had cornered them, at least until Sarutobi-sensei arrived.

Afterwards, when Tsunade was recovering, Jiraiya had hovered outside her door like a fretful mother, and when Orochimaru had ventured close enough, he'd grabbed him and whispered, low and furious, "_We gotta promise to protect her from now on." _

Orochimaru had been young, and he'd had so much hope for his team. He'd lie awake in bed sometimes and think of what would come of them. They'd grow up together, fierce and protective. They'd love each other, soft and tender. They'd fight and maybe die for each other, but it would be a good fight, and a good death, if it was for _each other. _So at the time, he'd nodded and agreed in his quiet voice, and that had been that.

Orochimaru blinks at Jiraiya and shakes his head. "No. I don't remember."

Jiraiya snaps. It's a strangely visual event. His shoulders tense and his fists clench at his sides and he shifts subconsciously from foot to foot until he's centered his balance. "…Then promise again. Right now." He snatches a kunai from his pouch, too quick to follow, and makes a sharp, vivid slash across one palm. When he finally turns to face Orochimaru, he's holding his bleeding hand out and away from him.

Orochimaru wants to tell him that he dreams of his death. Jiraiya tosses him a kunai. Orochimaru wants to tell him that he dreams of him screaming, but he doesn't. Instead, he catches the weapon.

"It's your turn," Jiraiya says tightly, and there's anger waiting in the wings of his tone.

Orochimaru merely blinks and holds the weapon gingerly by its looped hilt. He doesn't want to think about the blood or what it symbolizes, because if he did that, he'd have to start examining the rest of his life under closer scrutiny. He already knows he wouldn't like what he'd find. "…Jiraiya…"

"_Do it." _The taller boy pauses and he breathes. "You're gonna bleed and then you're gonna promise me that next time, you'll protect her. Do it." At the end, his words sound kin to a plea. It's there, under the surface. _Please, please, please…!_

Jiraiya loves his team. They're his family because he has none, they're his confidants and they're his precious people. He protects them, both Orochimaru and Tsunade, with everything he has. Orochimaru knows he'd die for them, at any time. Tsunade would do the same. Orochimaru…he used to think that way. That it would be so valiant of him to die saving one or both of them. He imagines that they'd get up every single day and thank him and he never quite realized he'd never be around to savor their gratitude. And he's had enough people die for _him _to know that eventually, you forget who you're thanking and why.

Orochimaru looks at the kunai, shakes flecks of Jiraiya's blood from it, and then lets it hover over his left hand, and he presses down. He watches in fascination as it punctures his skin, and as blood wells up and around the little wound. He watches, and he smiles. "Are you happy?" he asks, hating look on Jiraiya's face. He looks…contented. Settled. Peaceful, as if something has been forged between the two of them, deeper than a river and stronger than a bridge, and yet Orochimaru feels nothing but hollow. If he dies to protect Tsunade…if he dies…

_Everything I am…will disappear…_

Jiraiya moves lightly across the rooftop until they're standing within bare inches of each other. He reaches out and takes Orochimaru's hand, and he mashes their palms together in an effort to let the blood mingle. Orochimaru's eyes widen and he tries to jerk away but Jiraiya is focused and determined and he's _Jiraiya, _for crying out loud.

"We're…we're brothers now. All right? Forever and ever and fucking _ever _and you're _stuck _with me. This means I won't let you die, this means I won't let you go, this means I'm never gonna fucking...ab…abandon you. And neither of us is _ever _gonna abandon Tsunade. We've gotta…stick together. Right? It's the only way…the _only _way we'll get out of this war alive." His grip loosens. He steps away. It's almost an ultimatum.

Orochimaru studies his hand, and at the new inky patterns on his palm. "It's raining," he says interestedly at the exact time Jiraiya says, "Got something in my goddamned eye," and they look at each other a moment.

Eventually, Jiraiya starts to laugh.

* * *

Aweek later, Tsunade isdischarged from the hospital and permitted to go home. She calls Orochimaru, because Jiraiya doesn't have a phone and invites the two of them over for supper and movies and general hanging-outness. After confirming that she won't be the one to cook the supper, and that they can pick whatever movies they want, Orochimaru agrees for the both of them, and he stops at Jiraiya's out- of-the-way shack and drags him out of bed (why he had to do such a thing at four in the afternoon is a mystery to him) and he carts him off to Tsunade's house with Jiraiya mumbling something about edible undies as he rubs sleep from his eyes.

Tsunade's mother is a formidable figure in her mid-forties. She has long, strictly braided hair with nary a wisp out of place, and if she's ever gone anywhere without an apron, Orochimaru has yet to see it. She eyes the two of them as they show up on her doorstep and stares them down. Jiraiya swallows and bobs his head and mutters a 'ma'am' and Orochimaru merely looks at her.

She's never liked him. The first time they met, Orochimaru was seven. She looked right at him and told him she didn't like him, and she didn't really care what he had to say about that, either. She said that people with eyes like his were worthless and didn't deserve to be shinobi. Of course, she's never held a kunai a day in her life, so Orochimaru thinks she shouldn't have a say in the matter. But at the time, he'd been so eager for anyone's approval that he'd taken her harsh judgment particularly hard. She didn't even know him, yet she would judge him by what she could see? He'd gone home to his mother and asked why people did cruel things, and she'd merely smiled at him in that mysterious way of hers and patted her growing stomach and told him that she'd make his favorite meal that night.

The woman steps back and out of their way with a slight frown. Jiraiya manages not to look at her ample bosom as he kicks his geta off and makes a beeline for Tsunade's bedroom. All is well.

* * *

Tsunade's room is fairly large, very severe and subtly -and okay, not so subtly- feminine. The walls are pale cream, the bed has a large red comforter thrown across it, and there's a lacey, heart-shaped pillow propped on the mattress. Across from her bed is her dresser, on which sits a rickety old television so disused that when Orochimaru blows the VCR off tentatively, he gets a nose full of dust and spends the next ten minutes with a chronic sneezing fit. Jiraiya cackles at that and tells him that somewhere, a gaggling group of teenaged girls are discussing him voraciously. Orochimaru suppresses an urge to blush and picks out a movie instead.

None of them really pay attention to it. It's an old classic that they've seen before. And none of them have ever cared for movies, anyways. They're shinobi. They don't have time for relaxation, and when they do, they know it's more important to spend it with each other than lost in a fantasy world.

Two of the three members of their team end up in an undignified heap on the bed. Jiraiya and Tsunade are squabbling over the last chocolate truffle in one of Tsunade's 'get well soon' conglomerations, from hopeful admirers and friends alike, and finally Tsunade gives up and shoves the paper-wrapped chocolate down her shirt and _dares _Jiraiya to go after it.

Orochimaru murmurs dryly, "Tsunade, that isn't going to deter him at all, you realize?"

Jiraiya glowers at the both of them. "She's got nothin' to grope, chocolate's gonna melt... sorry, nope, just not worth the mental scarring."

Tsunade shrieks and hits him with a pillow and knocks him off the bed, and Orochimaru merely watches the two of them squabble and fight like siblings. "I'd rather have no boobs than no _brain!" _she retorts acidulously, and she continues her assault of the white-haired boy even once he's on the floor beside her bed, hands raised to ward off her attack. Feathers swirl around them and Orochimaru winces and puts a hand over his nose and mouth so he won't have to suffer another sneezing fit.

Jiraiya escapes, kicks the pillow out of Tsunade's hands and leaps back into a defensive position. He grins at Orochimaru as he does so, and the other boy is quite sure that can't bode well. "Hey, _you _could always go after it. I've always wondered if you had a thing for boys, Orochimaru…"

This time, Orochimaru joins in. He pounces on Jiraiya and holds him down while Tsunade ambles over to her desk and pulls out a basket of cosmetics. Jiraiya, seeing this, shrieks like a little girl and tries to get away, but he's not _really _trying, not _really, _because they're here and they're together and they're pretending that everything's all right, and none of them want this moment to end.

"Naa, Orochimaru? What do you think? Purple eye shadow, or…?"

"Gah! No! You evil hag, if you touch me with that shit I'm gonna hurt you-!"

"Whatever you think, Tsunade."

"Bright red, then," she said decisively. "It'll go nicely with his …stripe…thingies. Jiraiya, what the hell _are _those, anyways?" She daubs one finger in the little cosmetic container and waggles it menacingly.

Jiraiya struggles just for show, and to make it seem like his masculinity _hasn't _taken a major dive, and then he folds his arms and frowns up at Orochimaru. "It's a clan thing," he says quietly. "Doesn't matter. Whatever. Can we get back to watching the movie now?"

Tsunade freezes, her fingers coated with red makeup that doesn't, _doesn't _look like blood. She's looking down at the both of them, at Orochimaru straddling Jiraiya and at Jiraiya trying hard not to let his smile crack completely. And then she starts to cough. Jiraiya immediately dislodges Orochimaru and leaps to his feet and grips her by her shoulders. He doesn't quite give her a shake, but he comes close. "Tsunade!"

"I'm fine!" she shouts at him angrily. "I'm - fucking - _fine_! Leggo of me, you stupid oaf!" She kicks him and he lets go, more from surprise than from pain and gives her a wounded look.

She drags the back of one hand across her mouth as if in disgust, and then wipes her hand against her red skirt. It hides the fact that she's coughing up blood, but Jiraiya is too busy mustering a grin to notice, and Orochimaru knows better than to point it out to him. Eventually, Jiraiya laughs and rubs at the back of his neck with a hand and his eyes scrunch up with his smile. "Maa, maa! Sorry, Tsunade-hime. It's not like I was trying to grope you or anything." He picks up her discarded pillow and fluffs it a few times before setting it gingerly back on her bed.

She looks at him, and slowly she relaxes her posture, and her fingers uncurl from their fisted position, and she smiles sourly like there's a bad taste in her mouth. Orochimaru wonders if it's the blood or something else. "Sorry, Jiraiya, I didn't…"

"Oy, Tsunade. Is that a bra under your bed?" Jiraiya's kneeling beside it, one arm resting along the mattress, and his long white hair is preventing anyone else from getting a good look to wherever it is that his attention has been drawn. Tsunade blinks once.

"I - is there a _what?" _she yelps indignantly and drops down beside him and shoves him out of the way. Jiraiya topples backwards onto his rear and he grins at Tsunade, winks at Orochimaru and draws himself up until he's sitting cross-legged.

"You thinking about trying to stuff one or something?" he continues laconically, surveying his fingernails as he does so. "How're you ever gonna be the marriageable sort if you can't be an honest woman, Tsunade-hime?"

She scrambles back out from under the bed clutching a lacey red…_thing _that Orochimaru is fairly certain wouldn't keep any part of a human anatomy decently covered. Her face is every bit as crimson as the fabric. "Shut _up, _Jiraiya," she says warningly. "Unless you want me to remove your reason for living."

Orochimaru, smiling, asks, "What, his stomach?"

Jiraiya shoots him a grateful glance. They both know that _wasn't _what Tsunade was talking about. And then Orochimaru stands, dusts himself off and plucks a stray feather from his bangs. "Jiraiya, go get us something to eat."

"What? Why me?"

"Because Tsunade's mother doesn't _like _me," Orochimaru tells him patiently. "And you will eat anything that's been dead a decent amount of time before it comes to your plate. She's fond of you, I think."

Jiraiya grumbles, but climbs to his feet and shakes himself like an overgrown dog and slips out of the room. The hollow click of the door closing behind him makes Tsunade flinch.

"How bad?" he asks quietly.

She presses a hand to her stomach. "Not bad."

"Don't lie to me, Tsunade."

"I'm not! I'm fine, all right? As soon as my chakra's back to normal, I'll fix it myself. Don't need to trouble the medics; they've got enough on their plates." She pauses, and fidgets, and eventually sits on her bed and twirls a feather between her long, lithe fingers. They're a healer's hands, he thinks as he studies them. Meant to create rather than to destroy. He studies his own in contrast. Hard and scarred, and there's blood under his fingernails from only god knows how long ago. No matter how many times he washes his hands, he can never quite get rid of it.

"Orochimaru…" Tsunade says quietly, looking up at him. "Just don't tell Jiraiya, all right? I don't want him worrying about me, too. I'm fine, really. I'll take it easy for a while, I promise."

He accepts that, and nods. "We have a mission soon. Jiraiya and I. I've discussed it with Sarutobi-sensei; you're going to stay here and help with the villagers."

"What?" Her eyes narrow. "Where?"

"We'll be living in a village near a military outpost for a few months. It's not a big deal; we're just there to gather information." He doesn't tell her that it's an A-rank mission. He doesn't tell her that the reason they're going is because the last Konoha-nin to be stationed where they're going was found split open and spread-eagled with his intestines strewn all over the ground. It was speculated he'd still been alive when the birds had started to tear him apart…

She looks at him skeptically and exhales once, in a long shaky breath. "I'll come with you. It couldn't hurt-!"

Orochimaru shakes his head firmly. "They're afraid of us, Tsunade. They'll be on the look out for a group of three that matches our descriptions."

"I don't _ca-"_ she begins, just as Jiraiya returns, bearing a gigantic bowl of popcorn and a tray of tea. He's biting his lip to concentrate on balancing both things at once, and he pauses the instant he steps into the room, blinking back and forth between the two of them.

"Am I interrupting something, here?"

Hastily, Tsunade clears a place on her dresser for him to set the food and beverages down, and she smiles. "No, nothing. C'mon, let's watch the rest of this stupid film, and then we can go train."

So they curl up on the bed, Jiraiya and Tsunade, with the former sprawled out and the latter draped across his stomach. Orochimaru sits on the floor a short distance away from them, and would have been contented to stay there had Tsunade not grabbed him by a fist full of hair and dragged him towards the bed. "C'mon," she says gruffly. "You're part of this team, too."

Orochimaru smiles at that, and he keeps breathing.


	5. Remember

Softly Say Goodnight

-

AN: First, I'd like to apologize for how long it's taken me to get this chapter done. As with the previous one, I've started, re-started and scrapped the entire thing so many times that I got sick just thinking about it. And then, thanks be to the prodding of my friends and everyone who's reviewed, I decided that today was the day I was going to sit down and finish it, whether or not I liked it. Here's the result, whoo. Hugs, kisses and candy to everyone who's reviewed, it really makes my day.

Note; this chapter in particular has a lot of references to the play _Jiraiya Goketsu Monogatari, _which is where the characters of Orochimaru, Jiraiya and Tsunade originate from.

Special thanks to Nutmeg and Kuroikisei. Love you both!

-

The night before Orochimaru and Jiraiya leave on their mission, Tsunade stops by to see him. It's cold outside and it's been raining for hours, leaving the air with an earthen smell like a freshly dug grave. That in itself divulges memories of funerals too numerous to count and to painful to recall. How many people, how many casualties? And he's already forgotten their names. They couldn't have been that important anyways, but there are times when he forgets what color his mother's eyes were, or the sound of his father's laugh, or the delighted, high-pitched giggles of his sister.

And all the while that she sneaks in through a window and across his floor, he's thinking, _I can hear the rain on the roof. _

Tsunade crawls into bed beside him and immediately confiscates his blankets like they existed solely for her benefit, and she curls up on her side with one hand tucked under her chin. With her other hand, entirely unnecessarily, she reaches out and touches his cheek. "Wake up," she says, although she knows he already is. Sometimes, Tsunade says or does things that make it seem as if she's testing the water, waiting for an opportunity to jump in.

"You're an unusual houseguest," he tells her, not opening his eyes. He listens to the rain and basks in the warmth of the bed and Tsunade's body. She generates heat like a sun, yet the times he's been drawn to it and shunned by it are equal in number.

"Yeah, yeah, sorry." She doesn't sound sorry at all. In fact, she sounds rather smug, and he assumes it's because she was able to successfully disarm the traps littered about his apartment. The minutes tick away in silence, and by Tsunade's even breathing, Orochimaru starts to wonder if she's fallen asleep.

Tsunade has spent numerous nights in his bed, and it always manages to be innocent. Sometimes they talk and sometimes she cries and sometimes they don't say anything at all, and when he wakes up in the morning she's always gone. She had tried kissing him once; when they were a lot younger, and they privately agreed afterwards to never mention it to anyone ever again. About the time they both tipped their heads in the same direction and smashed their noses painfully together, they'd realized that it Wasn't Meant to Be. And although Jiraiya may tease him and other shinobi may sneer, Orochimaru knows he's not in love with Tsunade, and he knows that she is not in love with him.

In many ways, they're closer than he and Jiraiya, because Tsunade is smart and knows that things can go unsaid, whereas Jiraiya believes that everything worth thinking is also worth saying, never mind the trouble it gets him in.

Tsunade's voice, when finally she speaks, is subdued. To ply a cliché to the situation at hand, he can't help but think that this is it; this is the calm before the storm. This is the sky going green before a tornado touches down. This is the silence before a thunderclap. This is he and Tsunade and their twilight requiem.

"I brought you something," she ventures carefully, as if afraid her words could start an unwanted avalanche.

"Oh?"

"Mm. Yeah." She shifts on the bed, squirms until she's on her back instead of her side and produces a small, flat box, wrapped in stenciled paper. She hands the whole thing to him, along with an inkwell that alludes to the contents of the parcel. "It's nothing much," she says hastily, as he hesitates to take it.

Orochimaru doesn't reply, merely sits up in bed and flicks the light on with his tongue, seeing as how it's too far to reach with either hand or foot, and ninja are nothing if not resourceful. Tsunade makes a disgusted noise and he smirks at her in response.

"That's really gross, you freak," she chides as she sits up as well. She folds her long legs and makes his narrow bed wobble. "Well, go ahead and open it already."

He does so, and the little cherry wood box that the paper reveals is heavy in his hands, but expertly balanced. It looks expensive while its giver looks worried.

He opens it, to reveal a row of neat brushes made of badger-fur with short, stubby bristles. Beneath them, there are several layers of crisp rice paper, so fine and nearly-translucent that he's sure that if he held it up to the light, he could see through it.

Tsunade makes a noise, and Orochimaru clicks the box closed and glances at her.

"Don't go getting ideas!" she says warningly, but she's smiling. It's the fake sort of smile that he so hates to see on anyone's face. Humanity, as a whole, is comprised largely of liars. He doesn't see why his comrades should be different. "All this means it that you have no excuse to not-write to me, okay? The paper and ink and brushes were all made in Tea Country, so it's untraceable back to here in case somebody gets a hold of it."

He smiles at her, a little, which seems to fluster her.

"I got something for Jiraiya, too, but he's been weird since… well, since I mentioned his stupid clan stripes. I want to know what the hell's wrong with him, it's like he's sulking or something. He probably needs to get laid. I should find him a girl… except I think he's managed to insult or alienate every single one in the goddamned village."

Orochimaru knows very little of Jiraiya's history, because he's never cared to ask. When he was little, he assumed that everyone had a family like his own -loving mother, loving father, little sibling to protect, and that was that. By the time he was old enough to realize otherwise, asking others such personal information had become taboo. And with Jiraiya, well… anything he wants Orochimaru to know; he can just come out and say it.

What he does know was gleaned from the gossip of others, and from the few rare times when someone spoke unguardedly about the Hatake family. They'd been samurai, someone said once. Servants of the Daimyo of Earth Country. The stories from there seemed to diverge and become garbled, one said that a demon had attacked the Daimyo and the family had been driven out in disgrace. Others said that the Daimyo killed himself after being jilted by a lover. The basic gist of it was clear, however, and his shinobi-trained interrogation skills had sorted out the most pertinent information. Samurai. Disgraced.

Orochimaru doesn't really care about the other boy, but he does know that Jiraiya wouldn't want Tsunade knowing any of that, so he merely shrugs.

"Thank you."

That seems to snap the blonde girl out of a reverie, a waking dream of some sort or another, and she gives him a grateful look. "It was nothing, really. Just… look after Jiraiya, all right? I know that he's a clumsy idiot, and he's not as good as you, but… just…"

He re-opens the box and takes out a piece of paper and a brush, closes it yet again and reaches for the inkwell. With clear, proud strokes, he writes, _Tsunade-hime. What would you do if I said I would let him die? _

She leans across to see what he's written, likely expecting his name, or hers, or anyone's. A doodle, a scribble, something, _anything, _except what she actually sees.

She freezes, and takes a breath. Her fists clench, one in his blanket and the other against her thigh, and she bites her lip so hard he can smell but not see the blood that blossoms. And then she gestures for the brush, which he gives her gladly. She swirls it about the ink well and then daubs it across the page, writing, _I'd have to ask who you are, because the Orochimaru I know wouldn't do that. _She lifts her face and catches his eyes, and hesitates in handing the brush back to him. Her eyes are more scared now than worried.

_Wouldn't it be funny… _he begins, just as Tsunade starts to cough. He frowns over at her, annoyed at her tendency to dramatize and for ruining the moment, and she tries to wave him off, covering her mouth with her free hand.

Orochimaru slips his shirt off his shoulder so the sleeve dangles around his hand and bunches it up in his fingers before wiping at the flecks of blood on Tsunade's cheeks. She's pale beneath the mask of mortality, and her skin seems almost luminescent.

This time, when he kisses her, there is no awkwardness - only blood.

After that, she leaves without a word and shuts the light off on her way out. For a long time afterward Orochimaru lays on top of the blankets with his hands folded behind his head, and he listens to the rain on the roof. It sounds like the heartbeat of a dying world.

* * *

Tsunade does not sleep for the rest of the night, and she goes to see the Hokage at dawn. She sits outside his office, chews her fingernails and then the inside of her cheek, until a soft-spoken ANBU with a shock of red hair comes to collect her. "He thought you would have barged in by now," he says tonelessly, his voice a soft feminine alto.

Tsunade smiles, ducks around him and into the council room. The Sandaime Hokage is sitting there, flanked by his former teammates Koharu and Homura. The former offers a secret sort of smile; the latter merely adjusts his glasses and gives her a flat-lipped glower.

"Ah, Tsunade! Come in, come in. You should hear this." Sandaime waves her in and gestures at a chair.

"Sensei, this isn't-" she begins, just as Homura speaks, "Sarutobi, surely this can wait?"

Sandaime looks between his two teammates and then sighs, throws his hands up in the air. "She's here now. Would you have me throw her out of my office?"

Koharu glances sharply at both men, and her scowl holds an echo of reprimand. "Just because _you're _Hokage, Sarutobi-"

"Means I can do exactly what I want," he finishes for her with something of a flourish, as he signs his name on a sheet of paper in front of him. He hands it to her with a bit of a lopsided grin and she sighs, tucks a strand of brown hair behind one of her ears and takes it. She doesn't give further protest, and although Homura continues to frown, he does not gainsay Tsunade's presence again.

In front of them -kneeling on a convenient tatami mat- is a man with no forehead protector, although Tsunade thinks by the set of his shoulders and the way he seems to be aware of everything that he is in fact a shinobi.

"Sandaime-sama," the kneeling man begins uncertainly, after a covert glance to Tsunade. "Do you really want a child listening to this…?"

Sandaime gives the man a bit of a look, and leans forward. For someone so small, the aura he projects is extremely intimidating, and almost instinctively the kneeling man pushes himself back on his heels. "I understand. Forgive me."

"Nothing to forgive," Sandaime says genially as he rearranges himself more languidly in his chair. The hat, a sign of his station, is lopsided and skewed, but he pays it no attention. He looks drawn and weary, and there are more lines on his face than Tsunade remembers, and he's going gray at the temples. The effect is debonair, he truly looks the part, and yet she can remember times from her childhood when he'd looked anything but. A fool, through and through, that was how she'd thought of him. Now he looks the part of a leader, and wears its mantle without complaint. "Tsunade, sit down. Hiromaru, please start at the beginning."

She sinks into the chair he had indicated earlier, crosses her legs and listens intently for whatever little life lesson her sensei is trying to teach her here.

The man, Hiromaru, clears his throat, stands and places a hand over his heart. "The negotiations with Wind Country have not been successful. The diplomat and the emissary sent by our lord Daimyo have been officially missing for two weeks, but… three days ago, we received this." He pulls out an envelope and steps forward to hand it, not to Sandaime, but to Koharu. The woman takes it, unfolds it and wrinkles her nose. In the package lies a severed finger with a ring of office, Tsunade recognizes it as the official seal of the Daimyo's retainers.

Sandaime frowns grimly, wraps the finger back up in its gory little package and gestures for Tsunade to stand. "I want this analyzed, see if you can determine whether or not he was dead when the finger was removed." She nods and takes it, but she can't help but feel a little squeamish over the whole ordeal, which she finds silly. She's a medic nin, and she's _been _a medic-nin for years, but something about this whole scenario is making her skin crawl.

"The ambassadors from Wind showed up without a problem, and they got angry at the fact that we did not provide their counterparts for immediate negotiations. They had ninja with them, three of them. I… I am not certain of what happened, Sandaime-sama, but there was a fight. Everyone from their side was killed, and only one of our ninja escaped alive. And now the Kazekage is demanding that we surrender the survivor so he can be tried and executed."

Sandaime exhales heavily through his nose and reaches for his pipe. Koharu, without even looking at him, smacks his hand away.

"So," Homura begins, making a steeple of his hands. His dark eyes are intense and oddly intent, watching the messenger, who flinches. "What you are telling us is that the entire deal was staged, and they are trying to provoke us so that they feel justified in starting a war. Yes?"

Hiromaru frowns, but doesn't deny it. Homura leans back with a disgusted snort and he flicks a hand in a manner that indicates he's had enough of the entire affair. And, Tsunade reasons, he likely has. Her sensei has been Hokage for six years, and his teammates have been with him far longer than that. The political intrigue of the Kage and the Daimyo are not something Tsunade ever wants to be so intimately familiar with.

"We will have to hand over the survivor," Koharu says slowly, and Sandaime… _twitches _at her, a slight tick in his cheek and a rigidity of hand. She gives him a side-long glare and continues, "_If _we do not, you know what will happen. We cannot afford further conflict, especially not on the opposite frontier. The Kazekage has been envious of our land for years, and this war with Lightning Country has left us weak. Sarutobi, we cannot afford _another _war!" Her voice rises in pitch until it's almost a shout, and she slams a hand down on the desk hard enough to splinter the ancient wood.

Sandaime looks at her, and at her hand, and then he sighs again, takes off his hat and runs a hand through his hair. His hands are covered with the glove-mesh of his everyday shinobi attire. The hat captures his attention a while longer, at the brilliant red splashes that indicate the office it entails. After a moment of contemplation, he gingerly sets it back on his head and straightens it.

"…What's his name, this survivor?"

"Hagane Yuuta, Sandaime-sama."

The Hokage pushes his chair away from the ruined desk and stands, folds his arms behind his back and saunters over to the window. "I'll remember that," he says heavily, and Tsunade flinches at the way his voice breaks like an ocean surf. "Please return to the Kazekage and tell him that we will give him what he wants, and reiterate our desire for peace. I will speak with the Lords and hear their thoughts on the matter, and maybe they will be willing to make another try for a treaty. Thank you for this, Hiromaru. Dismissed."

"Hokage-sama," the man says, and bows low before leaving. Homura watches him go with a look of utter contempt, and when the door closes, the tension in the room rises almost perceptibly. It had been heavy before, now it was bordering on intolerable.

"That was foolish, Sarutobi," Homura says darkly. "The Kazekage is a spoiled child that thinks only of his own coffers. He would back down if we stood up to him. You have invited him to further push our limits until we _have _to bend or break. I will _not_ stand for this."

"Homura!" Koharu snaps sharply, idly picking splinters out of her left hand, the one she'd slammed against the desk. It is with the bloodied hand that she indicates Tsunade. "We have a guest."

"His student, no less, hah!" Homura turns away from the Hokage and folds his arms stubbornly. "So, child, did you learn anything?"

"Leave." And suddenly her sensei is not the Hokage merely in title but in _truth. _The tension increases again, and Tsunade wants to scream just to release the pressure. Instead, she looks back and forth between Homura and Sandaime and does nothing at all.

"Sarutobi," Koharu begins. Tsunade realizes that the dark-haired woman is likely the one to diffuse the tempers in this relationship, as she is with Orochimaru and Jiraiya.

"I have a few things I would like to discuss with my student." Sandaime leaves no room for arguing. Silently, Koharu nods, stands and walks away, and her left foot drags a little as she walks, a reminder of some old injury. She pauses and pivots on her foot at the last possible second, catches Homura by his shirt and drags him with her, and when the door clicks shut behind them, Tsunade buries her head in her hands and tears at her hair with sharp, insistent little tugs. She feels sick. Sick because of the war, because of the tension and the battles going on within the hierarchy of an organization she's supposed to put all her faith in. Sick because she's not and never will be in a position to change it, to change any of it.

The Hokage turns to face her with a smile that she can't believe is genuine. "I'm sorry about… some of that," he offers apologetically. "Would you like anything to drink?"

She forces her hands to her side and stands. She's almost as tall as him now, and he seems to realize this with a beleaguered sigh and a muttered, "at least my children still only come up to my waist." If he were closer, he might have ruffled her hair. "So, Tsunade. You likely weren't here just for that episode, so, why then? Is it about Orochimaru and Jiraiya's mission?"

She smoothes her skirt and looks at the floor. "Orochimaru… the night of the last attack, when he left Jiraiya's, you mentioned snakes. What did that mean?"

The Sandaime Hokage arches an eyebrow, wanders back over to his desk and fishes a pipe from the remains. It takes him ten seconds longer than it should to light it. He's obviously stalling for time.

"Sensei! I asked a question!" Hands on her hips, arms akimbo, Tsunade looks more than ready to damage his remaining belongings beyond repair.

He glances at her, unimpressed by her threatening stance. The smoke from his pipe forms a wreath around him, a gaudy halo. "Have you seen a tattoo on Orochimaru's left arm lately?"

"Should I have?"

He rubs at his chin and then scratches at his cheek. "So, it hasn't permanently surfaced yet…"

"Sensei, if you don't start making sense _right now…"_

"Hm? Oh, sorry, Tsunade." He takes another puff and blows a smoke-ring. "Did you sleep well?"

"_Sensei_!"

Realizing that this isn't something he's going to get out of this without effort, he clears his throat before he speaks. "Contracts with snake-summons are strictly forbidden. Do you know why?"

She frowns, considering. All the scriptures she read on the magics, how snake, toad, slug, bird and spider are the primary magic summons and how they are the most binding contract. The other, lesser ones, the ones that are tied uniquely to the hidden villages, those are the common ones. "I've never even heard that it was forbidden, just that it was rare, and that no one living in my generation or… or yours, has done it."

"Hm. Well, yes, I suppose that's all the information that people want knowing… ahem, anyways. The highest summon of the snake order is called Yamata-no-Orochi," Sandaime continues as he starts to pace. "He has eight heads, and is taller than our mountain monument. Not something you, or I, or anyone would want to have to fight. You've heard of the ancient Otogakure, yes? The Village of the Sound? And that it disappeared? Well, from what we've been able to piece together from the ruins, the damage was caused by what we've always assumed to be Yamata-no-Orochi." Tsunade nods again in conjunction with his words. Otogakure no Sato, to their north, is a wealth of historic importance. She, Jiraiya and Orochimaru have been there only once.

"And within him, sealed away by a legendary hermit of Echigo Fuji, is the sword Kusanagi. Those chosen by the snakes have two paths. Either they are consumed by them, or they conquer them and earn the right to fight Yamata-no-Orochi. If that happens, and the combatant wins, the sword becomes theirs by right." Sandaime gestures to a pair of crossed swords hanging behind his desk and she glances up at them. "No other sword could withstand a blow from Kusanagi. It is the ultimate weapon."

Tsunade inhales, and takes it all in. Even when she's sure there are things she doesn't and will never understand, she forges onward yet again. "So, Orochimaru, because of this contract…?"

"Yes. Either it will kill him or drive him mad. And if he fights with Yamata-no-Orochi…"

"But…" She starts to laugh. "Sensei, don't be stupid. He's _Orochimaru. _He wouldn't…I mean, just for some stupid sword? Why the hell would he do all that, put himself in danger like that? Put _us _in danger… like… like that?" Her laughter becomes forced, and Sandaime knows from looking at her that several things have probably just fallen into place. She's known for a long while that Orochimaru is not entirely stable, as has he, as have they all. Yet no one wants to say it aloud for fear it becomes true.

"You're right," he tells her genially. "He is _Orochi_maru."

She starts, eyes wide, lips a thin line, and then she bows. It's a little shaky and a lot defiant, and he can hear the inherent denial in her voice. She wants to protect her teammate, to protect him from everything, up to and including himself. Sandaime doesn't wonder how far she will go to do it. "His given name was Yashagoro, you know."

He knows. He's always known. And he's not beyond hoping that it will make a difference.

* * *

Orochimaru and Jiraiya leave shortly afterwards, and Tsunade sees them off at the gate. She forces a smile and doesn't meet Orochimaru's eyes as she kisses Jiraiya on the cheek. "For luck," she tells him, and he grins like a loon and rubs the spot with a thumb.

"I don't want your luck, Tsunade!" he jokes. "It sucks! I'll probably go get myself killed now, keh!"The second he speaks he knows his words shouldn't have been said aloud. But instead of apologizing immediately or trying to take them back or even to talk over them, he just rubs at the back of his neck. "Maa, well, it's not like Orochimaru would let me die, anyways. Naa, Oro-_chan?" _

Orochimaru quirks an eyebrow and says nothing. Tsunade is trying to keep her facial expression neutral but he can see the way worry creases her brow and makes fine lines at the corners of her eyes. "Jiraiya," she hisses. "Don't be an idiot."

"Only for you, princess," he tells her with a jaunty wink. "Now, do you think I could get another kiss…?"

She punches him and he stumbles backwards, arms folded over his stomach from the force of her blow. They train sometimes, but he can't recall a time when she's ever hit him quite that hard. "Ow. That _hurt, _Tsunade-hime…" he pouts, and Tsunade lifts her fist again, other hand bracing it at the elbow.

"Yeah, well, don't make me do it again, you perverted jerk!" Silence falls between them, and the sun creeps a little higher on the horizon, using the mountains like some archaic stepping stone. The golden light turns Jiraiya's hair blond and gives Tsunade the countenance of a goddess. Unselfconsciously, Orochimaru moves into the shade.

He waits a little longer for Tsunade to say good-bye, but when no gesture seems forthcoming, he turns and takes several steps away from the gates and from Konoha and from everything he's fought for all his life. He's forgotten what it was supposed to mean, forgotten that it was ever a symbol he would have died for. His forehead protector is suddenly heavy and cold, so he takes it off and stuffs it in a pocket.

"Orochimaru-! Wait… wait a sec."

"Good-bye, Tsunade," he tells her calmly. He does not turn around, nor does he feel her touch on his arm. He might have stopped, if she would have dared. Instead, he hears the shift of sandals on the gravel and a whispered exchange pass between his two teammates before Jiraiya jogs to catch up with him. The tall boy slings an arm about his shoulders and gives him a playful shake, like a dog with a chew toy.

"You shouldn't be so cold!" Jiraiya chides him once they're out of hearing range of Konohagakure. "Tsunade-hime is just worried about you, ya jackass."

Somehow, Orochimaru isn't so sure of that.


	6. Continue

Softly Say Goodnight

-

AN: Wow. This chapter has taken me an insanely long time to get out. Never fear! I'm not losing interest in this story; I'm just a horrible procrastinator who needs a good swift kick in the arse to get me motivated. Ahah, yes, aren't I cool. Also, I was having some plot problems and blah blah blah. Long story short, HERE IS THE FIC. Rock _on. _

For fear of being redundant, I shall continue to thank people so much for all the support I've gotten for this fic. I'm totally all -omgsquee- over this whole thing.

Addendum - This is the last chapter before I pull a Kishimoto and jump ahead two years.

-

The city they are in - Toyu-ou - is a large, economical city on a peninsula between Wave and Lightning countries, the summit for coming negotiations between Kirigakure and Kumogakure. It has been said and speculated both that they will form an alliance that will crush Konoha.

-

When Jiraiya enters the room, Orochimaru is the first thing to catch his eye. He's dressed in princely finery, as befits his mock-rank. His pants are embroidered with bits of silver and gold and his hair is slicked back in a queue, the style worn by nobles in Earth Country. His eyes are brown, like the color of old blood. It's a dangerous bit of playacting, but he's posing as the son of a Lord, and he has to look the part. He's certainly been acting it, from the rumors that have reached Jiraiya's dock-side haven.

The room itself is far more ornate than what Orochimaru is wearing, though Jiraiya wouldn't have thought it possible. Rice-paper screens partition off segments of the room, painted in golds and blues and silvers and reds. On one there is a phoenix, on another a dragon. There are lavish red futons strewn here and there, made of what looks like crushed velvet, with dangling tassels in bronze thread. The low table at which Orochimaru is sitting is made of solid oak, and there are papers littered and strewn across it, some with graceful calligraphy and some with the harsh brushstrokes of someone angered or perhaps in a hurry.

There is a mirror on the wall, wreathed in ivory, but it is covered.

He stands there waiting for Orochimaru to acknowledge him, though he does not wait patiently. He taps his foot and smacks his lips and sighs exasperatedly every once in a while. Orochimaru continues to ignore him, brushing hair out of his face or behind his ears while his eyes scan a document before him. Finally, Jiraiya gives up on the pretense of pleasantry and goes to get himself a drink from the enameled mini-bar behind one of the screens. He had taken his geta off at the door but his bare feet leave dusty prints across one of the carpets.

Orochimaru holds out a hand as well, as Jiraiya stands behind him with a decanter of fine wine and two fluted glasses, so he pours a glass for the both of them and smacks one into Orochimaru's outstretched hand, slopping wine all over the place as he does so.

Orochimaru turns his head just enough to give him a very dry glance. And thus do they begin their new bit of subterfuge. "My father," Orochimaru begins, voice succinct as he pulls a silken handkerchief from one sleeve to mop up the wine. "Commissioned a luxury yacht nearly a year ago, now. I understand that the old shipmaster died, and that you are undertaking to finish his the commission? He has sent me to, ah; _assure _that there will be no further difficulty."

Jiraiya takes a deep drink of his wine before responding. "Yeah, that's right."

Orochimaru's artificially colored eyes flicker to the single window in the room, and then to the door. Jiraiya knows what he is doing, and keeps his own chakra muted so as not to interfere. Orochimaru has always been better at this sort of thing, though he would never readily admit it.

"I trust that it is going well, then?" Orochimaru's way of asking – have you gathered information, is it useful, has anyone gotten suspicious of you?

Jiraiya grins, doffs his straw hat and sprawls contentedly on a futon. It's probably worth more than he makes in a year on his shinobi's salary. "A few difficulties, here and there. One of the logs that was being seasoned and fire-hardened split, and will need to be replaced. I estimate an extra month of labor." Translation: I had to kill three Kumogakure shinobi just last week, what do you think, moron?

Orochimaru raises an eyebrow, touches his pale lips to the glass but does not drink. "We aren't being watched."

Jiraiya nods, and drains off the dregs of his glass, looking longingly towards the crystal decanter. He hadn't anticipated how damned _good _the stuff was going to be. "This place is crazy, man. Everywhere you go, it's the same damn thing, and I haven't heard from the princess yet – you?" And it is unusual, or more than unusual, that in the four months they've been away, they haven't heard from her.

Orochimaru shakes his head wordlessly, though he shuffles the papers on the table a little more, and Jiraiya groans. "Well, when we get back we'll … pardon, _I'll _bitch at her. You can stand there and … smirk. And flick your tongue or something, that always creeps her out. We can totally do a good-shinobi, bad-shinobi shtick."

In amusement, Orochimaru traces the lip of his wineglass. "_If _we get back," he reminds the other boy a little too coldly, a little too quietly and a lot too calmly. All at once the lighthearted atmosphere that Jiraiya had been painstakingly building up splits as if cut by a knife. What they are left with is tension, the sort that makes it difficult to speak and to sit without fidgeting.

"… Yeah, well. Damn, you're a killjoy, jackass. Why can't you just keep your mouth shut?" He hops to his feet and starts to pace, partly so he can get nearer to the wine without seeming too conspicuous, but mostly so he can just be doing something, anything that isn't thinking about what they're doing. He isn't angry, though. He knows just how much it takes to pretend you're something you're not for this long, and Orochimaru was definitely awarded the short end of the stick in terms of cover stories. Almost as an afterthought, he adds, "I don't hold it against you, though."

Orochimaru snorts delicately and finally deigns take a sip of his wine. He makes a face afterwards as if it isn't quite to his taste. He sets it on the table, pushing papers out of the way, but every so often he laps at it with his tongue, because he knows it will annoy Jiraiya.

True to form, Jiraiya throws the decanter's stopper at him. Both are silent for a while, as Orochimaru's eyes drift over documents, over the scrawled signature of their princess, and at her angry/annoyed/worried enquiries as to why they haven't responded to her letters. Then he pushes it under an invitation to a get-together from the richest of the local merchants. Jiraiya, he thinks, doesn't need to know about the letters.

"I watched the Northern Lights the other night," Jiraiya says abruptly, obviously bound and determined to change the subject. "First time I've done that in years. And there's this girl, too… ha, she's nothing like our princess, but she's pretty enough and she's got this cute smile and I think she likes me, I really do. She _giggled _when I groped her, okay? Usually I get smacked."

Orochimaru curls a lip. "If she likes you at all, it's because of the role you're playing, not you yourself. Stop with the sentimentality, before it gets you killed."

Jiraiya is quiet a moment, fiddling with his glass and a brightly-colored bandana he's pulled from his hair. He rests one arm along the sill of a window and leans out, looking down into the street. Instead of getting angry, instigating one of their many spats, he merely looks back at Orochimaru and smiles. It may be a touch brittle but at least it's there. It's as if he's sitting there saying 'Look, see, I'm still willing to try. Don't you want to help?' "Awww, I'm touched. You really do care. Tch, jackass." After a moment of silence, he springs to his feet to pace.

He reaches for Orochimaru's wineglass when he's near enough, and when he grabs it to pour the other boy a refill, the flurry of his hands causes several of the papers to drift forwards as if on a breeze.

And maybe it's poetic irony or just a bastardized version of karma, but Orochimaru doesn't quite move fast enough to cover Tsunade's letters.

Jiraiya is simple but he is not stupid – stupid ninjas do a poor job of surviving in wartime, and he's trained to look at things and in the minimum amount of time take in the maximum amount of detail.

The first thing he sees is Tsunade's signature.

He sets the wine glass down with an almost uncharacteristic calmness, and picks up the first of the letters. He stands there, paper crinkling in his white-knuckled grasp as he reads, aloud:

"To Orochimaru, and Jiraiya too if you're actually literate enough to read,

Haven't heard from you guys in a while. Things are all right here, boring though. I've asked Sensei to assign me a mission but so far the only thing I've gotten to do is take watch around the city while I finish mending. There haven't been any attacks but everyone's on edge anyways. Orochimaru, you bastard, why haven't you written yet? I gave you that kit for a reason, you know! And Jiraiya – if you're out there compromising some poor girl's innocence, I'm gonna kick your goddamned ass."

After a while, Orochimaru tunes out Jiraiya's voice and looks out the nearest and most convenient window, noting the flight path of some low-flying bird. Jiraiya finishes and discards the first letter, moves on to the second, and then the third and the forth and he stops mid-way through the fifth and Orochimaru looks at him dryly, raising an eyebrow as he does so.

"So." Jiraiya says, and a muscle jumps in his jaw, making it clear just how angry he is. "When were you planning on telling me?" He throws the paper in Orochimaru's face. "I've been fucking worried about her, you goddamned bastard! Anything could have happened back in Konoha and you were just fucking keeping these letters all to your goddamned self, what the _fuck_ Orochimaru!"

Orochimaru shrugs, and quashes the slightest tinge of guilt. He doesn't feel the need to say anything and so he doesn't, merely looks at Jiraiya with as much condescension as he can manage.

He's only mildly surprised when Jiraiya grabs him by the collar of his shirt and jerks him to his feet and starts yelling obscenities at him, ending with something about rhetoric and honor and ninjas and how this isn't how they were taught and why the fuck does Orochimaru get off on deceiving his own goddamned teammates.

Orochimaru's palm, the one with the faded white scar, twinges a little. "You shouldn't be so loud, Jiraiya," he says calmly, pointing at the open window. "Someone might be listening."

And so Jiraiya fumes in silence, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. The bandana falls, abandoned, to the floor, a bright splash of red against the rich white carpets. The wine glass does the same, only to greater effect, for it creates a stain.

There is a knock at the door.

Orochimaru and Jiraiya are both alert and on guard so fast that there is no discernable point between the happening and the being. From somewhere, Jiraiya conjures a kunai and Orochimaru's lithe fingers form a seal.

At Orochimaru's nod, Jiraiya moves to open the door, undoing one of the heavy latches and pushing it open. There's a child standing there, looking frightened and ill at ease. His uniform marks him as one of the hotel's employees, though he seems a little young. "I… I'm sorry, I heard yelling, I thought maybe something was wrong, I…"

Orochimaru relaxes. Jiraiya does not. "What did you hear?"

"Shinto," Orochimaru says Jiraiya's alias calmly. "Don't frighten the poor child." It is true. He looks on the verge of either bursting into tears or running for his life. He can't be older than ten, and he has no shinobi's training that has taught him to hide his emotions.

With steady hands that had been so ready to kill, Orochimaru pours a third serving of wine and beckons the child closer. Jiraiya stares at him in wariness coupled with disbelief. Disbelief because he has never heard Orochimaru speak with that particular tone (sweet and soft and soothing, like a waterfall) and wariness because he doesn't see why he has a reason to start now.

"I apologize," Orochimaru says, as he pushes the glass into the boy's hands and gives Jiraiya a rather esoteric glance, as if he senses the wariness and is puzzled by it. "It was good of you to come. I will be sure to make a recommendation to your supervisor for your quick thinking."

The boy is still trembling somewhat, but he manages a smile, paper-thin and just as flimsy. "I'm sorry, m'lord, I didn't hear anything." Momentarily, he adds, "I'm Kosuke." By his expression and his body language, Jiraiya thinks that the kid heard at least that they were ninja, and he kicks himself mentally.

Orochimaru returns to the table that he had sat at moments earlier and rests his elbows on it, chin in his folded hands. "My name is Orochimaru." His eyes flicker again towards Jiraiya, only this time there is malice there. Jiraiya starts as if stabbed with a senbon.

He knows, then, that Orochimaru wouldn't have given his real name unless…

"Don't drink that!" he says suddenly, roughly, as he slaps the glass away from the boy's hands just a heartbeat too late. His lips are dark with berry wine, and his eyes are wide.

Orochimaru makes a noise that is almost a hiss as the glass shatters and the dark liquid stains the floor. They are not on carpet, here. The boy looks between them, and has just enough time to ask, "Wh - what's wrong?" before he convulses, once, not quite hard enough to snap his neck but enough to drop him to the floor. The foam at his mouth is tinted with blood, and Jiraiya's mind tells him immediately that the boy probably bit his tongue.

"You fucking _bastard!" _For the second time that day, he rounds on Orochimaru, intent on grabbing him and perhaps on smacking some goddamn sense into him, even though nothing he says or does will change the fact that there's a child dying on the floor behind them.

Orochimaru is smiling, and he stands slowly, unhurriedly, to look over Jiraiya's shoulder. "Pity he didn't break his neck. It's going to take a while for him to die like that."

"What did you give him? Where's the serum for it!"

"There is none."

Jiraiya stares at him, but the boy's thrashing brings him back to his senses in alarmingly short order. With one bitter, angry look at his comrade, he marches over to the kid, bends down and slits his throat. Blood spills out, hot and red, onto the hardwood, and he steps away from it so he doesn't leave footprints. He watches, though, as it spreads and eventually touches the fringe of the carpet and one of those fancy fucking futons.

"I'll get rid of the body," Jiraiya volunteers eventually, hating that he can't be more repulsed by what he's saying.

"Yes," Orochimaru agrees. "Please."

-

The day of the summit arrives. The Raikage and Mizukage both make appearances and withdraw for negotiations, making known the severity of the happenstance. Rarely in these days of war do the Kage leave their fortified villages. Orochimaru mingles with the few daimyo that are included in the discussion, though they are not permitted into the central antechamber. The real son of the Earth Country Daimyo lies in an alley, naked and with his face and fingers burned off as if by acid.

The summit runs for forty-seven hours, upon which time both the Kage emerge and return with their retainers to their respective villages. There is a pressure in the air, almost electric, and on the lips and tongues and in the hearts of men there is a whisper of war.

Jiraiya catches a glimpse of Orochimaru as he leaves the large, ornate building in which the negotiations took place, but the other shinobi doesn't so much as spare him a glance.

He looks paler than usual, though.

-

That night, he lies on a bed of little more than reeds and isn't really surprised when Orochimaru comes to find him when the moon is high and heavy in the sky above.

As if expecting him to be asleep, (facilitated, perhaps, by the fact that Jiraiya closes his eyes and fakes a snore when he senses the other's presence) Orochimaru clamps a hand over his mouth and pins him down. His fingers are chilled as if he'd had his hands entombed in ice.

"We have to leave," he says, when Jiraiya looks at him. "Now."

Jiraiya sits up and shoves him away. "Why?" He knows he shouldn't be asking, but he does it anyways. Orochimaru narrows his eyes, and for the first time in the flickering light, Jiraiya realizes that he's dropped the henge that had kept him inconspicuous. That, more than anything, brings him fully alert and wary.

"The city has been attacked. All shinobi are suspect, and the city officials are checking passports and identification thoroughly enough to break our cover," Orochimaru drawls in an imperiously annoyed tone. "I _could_ leave you here."

Jiraiya grunts in answer and starts rummaging for a shirt that's at least relatively clean. "Who's responsible?"

Orochimaru purses his lips and gives him a long, level look. The dark violet markings around his eyes make him look older and perhaps more tired than he is.

"I am."

Jiraiya says nothing immediately, giving the other boy a chance to give a reason for this unexpected announcement. Orochimaru raises both his eyebrows at this and looks only mildly thwarted, reminding Jiraiya of a cat that's had its bird escape from beneath its claws.

"I was given an order to destroy the city if the peace-talks went well," he says curtly, "because Toyo-ou is under the protection of one of the surviving orders of Samurai." He punctuates his words with the wave of one elegant hand. "If we strike here, now, the Samurai's code of honor will force them to take action, and it will alleviate some of the pressure on Konohagakure."

Jiraiya stiffens marginally when the Samurai are mentioned. He will never actively admit to hating them, but he certainly held no affection for the memories they stir. He pulls his shirt on over his head and gets to his feet, causing Orochimaru to do the same.

"It's underhanded," he says finally, but he is obviously not in the mood to argue. "I thought we were just here for subterfuge – Sarutobi-sensei never told me anything about _this." _

Orochimaru smiles somewhat, and his teeth are stark-white against his too-pale skin. "It was not an order from Sarutobi-_sensei. _It came from his teammate, Homura. And I was told to exclude you."

Jiraiya snarls, shoves past Orochimaru and stalks out into the night. He has a boat tied up and waiting on the dock, because in some corner of his mind he'd been expecting… _something _like this.

-

Orochimaru leaves the rowing of the tiny skiff to Jiraiya, who notices when the other boy pulls his sleeve up past his forearm and studies something. There are inky black figures against his skin, and the moonlight makes a mockery of them, twisting them as if they are alive and dancing.

"What's that?" Jiraiya asks, more for something to say than any real desire to know.

"Nothing," Orochimaru says, and pulls the sleeve back down.

Behind them, the city burns.

-

END PART ONE.


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